"There couldn't have been many such officers," the Senator agreed.
"But when I go abroad I don't want the whole of the United States to come with me."
"It takes the gilt off getting back for you?" suggested poppa a little stiffly.
Miss Bingham failed to take the hint. "We find Europe infested with Americans," she continued. "It disturbs one's impressions so. And the travelling American invariably belongs to the very least desirable class."
"Now I shouldn't have thought so," said the Senator, with intentional humour. But it was lost upon Miss Bingham.
"Well, if you like them," said the other one, "you'd better go in the coach."
The Senator lifted his hat. "Madam," he said, "I thank you for giving to me and mine the privilege of visiting a very questionable scene of the past in the very best society of the present."
And as the guide was perspiring more and more impatiently, we got in.
For some moments the Senator sat in silence, reflecting upon this sentiment, with an occasionally heaving breast. Circumstances forbade his talking about it, but he cast an eye full of criticism upon the fiacre rolling along far in the rear, and remarked, with a fervor most unusual, that he hoped they liked our dust. We certainly made a great deal of it. Momma and I, looking at our fellow travellers, at once decided that the Misses Bingham had been a little hasty. The fat gentleman, who wore a straw hat very far back, and meant to enjoy himself, was certainly our fellow-citizen. So was his wife, and brother-in-law. So were a bride and bridegroom on the box seat—nothing less than the best of everything for an American honeymoon—and so was a solitary man with a short cut bristly beard, a slouch hat, a pink cotton shirt, and a celluloid collar. But there was an indescribable something about all the rest that plainly showed they had never voted for a president or celebrated a Fourth of July. I was still revolving it in my mind when the fat gentleman, who had been thinking of the same thing, said to his neighbour on the other side, a person of serious appearance in a black silk hat, apropos of the line he had crossed by, "I may be wrong, but I shouldn't have put you down to be an American."
"Oh, I guess I am," replied the serious man, "but not the United States kind."