“I’m surprised you should know such a woman.”
“Oh, bless you, she’s a Vestal Virgin to ladies I could introduce you to across the Channel.”
“How horrible!” cried the young American.
“For pity’s sake, don’t tell me you’re a Nonconformist,” his father pleaded.
“I’m an Episcopalian,” the son answered. He relapsed into his stare; and then at dinner it turned out that he was a teetotaller and didn’t use tobacco.
In his diary, before he went to bed. Harold made this entry:—
“London cab-fares are sixpence a mile, with a minimum of a shilling. There are upwards of 10,000 cabs in London. The city is better paved than Boston, but not so clean. Many of the wards preserve their original parochial systems of government. The people aren’t so go-ahead as ours, and the whole place lacks modernity. The tone of English society seems to be very low. To-morrow I shall visit Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Hyde Park, the British Museum, and the Victoria Embankment. Qy.: what was the cost of the construction of the latter?”
That will give a notion of the dance he led his father on the following day. Harold stared at most of the “sights,” as he called them, in solemn silence. Of Westminster, however, he remarked that it was in a bad state of repair. “The English people don’t seem to have much enterprise about them,” he said. “Now if this were in America—” But his father did not catch the conclusion. St. Paul’s struck him as surprisingly dirty. “You should see the new Auditorium in Chicago,” he suggested. “I was out there last year. That’s what I call fine architecture.” And then, as they drove along the Embankment, he propounded his query anent its cost; and his father cried, “If you ask me questions like that. I shall faint.” Harold’s diary that night received this pathetic confidence:—
“On the whole London doesn’t come up to any of the large American cities. As for my father, I hoped yesterday that he was only putting it on for a joke, but I’m afraid now that he really is very light-minded. He wears an eyeglass and speaks with a strong English accent. Expenses this day. And so forth.”
The elder Weir, at the same time, was likewise engaged in literary composition:—