The mass of personalities, each more trumpery than the other, those details of people’s private life, and all the gossip daily served up in the newspapers, are they not proof enough that curiosity is a characteristic trait of the American?
This curiosity, which often shows itself in the most impossible questions, gives immense amusement to Europeans. Unhappily, it amuses them at the expense of well-bred Americans—people who are as innocent of it as the members of the stiffest aristocracy in the world could be. The English, especially, persist in not distinguishing Americans who are gentlemen from Americans who are not.
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And even that easy-going American bourgeois, with his childish but good-humored nature, they often fail to do justice to. They too often look at his curiosity as impertinence and ill-breeding, and will not admit that, in nine cases out of ten, the freedom he uses with you is but a show of good feeling, an act of good-fellowship.
Take, for instance, the following little story:
An American is seated in a railway carriage, and opposite him is a lady in deep mourning, and looking a picture of sadness; a veritable mater dolorosa.
“Lost a father?” begins the worthy fellow.
“No, sir.”
“A mother, maybe?”
“No, sir.”