“Well, I think she was right.”
There you are! There you have us at our very worst! And with this plump specimen of the American in Europe at his very worst, I turn back to the English: only, pray do not fail to give those other Americans who were shocked by the outrage of the lamp their due. How wide of the mark would you be if you judged us all by the one who approved of that horrible vandal girl’s act! It cannot be too often repeated that we must never condemn a whole people for what some of the people do.
In the two-and-a-half anecdotes which follow, you must watch out for something which lies beneath their very obvious surface.
An American sat at lunch with a great English lady in her country-house. Although she had seen him but once before, she began a conversation like this:
Did the American know the van Squibbers?
He did not.
Well, the van Squibbers, his hostess explained, were Americans who lived in London and went everywhere. One certainly did see them everywhere. They were almost too extraordinary.
Now the American knew quite all about these van Squibbers. He knew also that in New York, and Boston, and Philadelphia, and in many other places where existed a society with still some ragged remnants of decency and decorum left, one would not meet this highly star-spangled family “everywhere.”
The hostess kept it up. Did the American know the Butteredbuns? No? Well, one met the Butteredbuns everywhere too. They were rather more extraordinary than the van Squibbers. And then there were the Cakewalks, and the Smith-Trapezes’ Mrs. Smith-Trapeze wasn’t as extraordinary as her daughter—the one that put the live frog in Lord Meldon’s soup—and of course neither of them were “talked about” in the same way that the eldest Cakewalk girl was talked about. Everybody went to them, of course, because one really never knew what one might miss if one didn’t go. At length the American said:
“You must correct me if I am wrong in an impression I have received. Vulgar Americans seem to me to get on very well in London.”