Then he took us to the top of the terrace facing the palace, and, pointing to the entrance, he said:
“In the left wing were the chambers of the King’s guests. In the right wing were his own. Therefore, he placed a comma between those two words ‘Sans’ and ‘Souci,’ to indicate that those at the left were ‘without,’ while with himself was—‘Care.’”
While we were there the Emperor drove by and spoke to our cabman, saying, “How is business?” Seeing how much pleasure it gave the poor fellow to repeat it, we kept asking him to tell vis what the Kaiser said to him.
First my companion would say:
“When was it and what happened?”
And when he had quite finished, I would say:
“It wasn’t the Emperor himself, was it? It must have been the coachman who spoke to you.”
“No, not so, ladies. It was the great Kaiser himself. He said to me—” And then we would get the whole thing over again. It was charming to see his pleasure.
When we returned home we entered the hotel between rows of palms, and we dropped money into each of them. It seemed to me that fifty servants were between me and the elevators. However, it was New Year’s, and we tried not to be bored by it.
People talk so much of the expense of foreign travel, but to my mind the greatest expenditures are in paying for extra luggage and in fees. Otherwise, I fancy that travel is much the same if one travels luxuriously, and that in the long run things would be about equal. The great difference is that in America all travel luxuries are given to you for the price of your ticket, and here you pay for each separate necessity, to say nothing of luxury, and your ticket only permits you to breathe. But the annoyance of this continuous habit of feeing makes life a burden. One pays for everything. It is the custom of the country, and no matter if you arrange to have “service included,” it is in the air, in the eyes of the servants, in the whole mental atmosphere, and you fee, you fee, you fee until you are nearly dead from the bother of it. In Germany they raise their hats and rise to their feet every time you pass, even if you pass every seven minutes, and when the time comes for you to go, you have to pay for the wear and tear of these hats.