Perhaps Mr. Mafferton did not know how his family had intended to behave to me. At all events, he offered no apology for their conduct. I may say that the only thing of any consequence that resulted from our drive was the resolution which I am carrying out on board the s.s. 'Etruria' to-day.
The ladies' steward of the 'Etruria,' a little fellow with large blue eyes and spectacles and a drooping moustache, is very polite and attentive. His devotion, after Mr. Mafferton's, seems the embodiment of romance. I shall hesitate about tipping him. He has just brought me some inspiring beef-tea, which accounts for those asterisks.
[Original]
The worst of it was Lady Torquilin's scolding next morning—not that she said anything unkind, but because it gave me the idea that I had treated her badly too. I should be so sorry to think that I had treated Lady Torquilin badly. She seemed to think that I should have told her in the very beginning that I was engaged to Mr. Arthur Greenleaf Page, of the Yale University Staff. She seemed to think that I should have told everybody. I don't see why, especially as we are not to be married until Christinas, and one never can tell what may happen. Young ladies do not speak of these things quite so much in America as you do in England, I think. They are not so openly known and discussed. I must apologise to myself for bringing Mr. Page in even at this stage, but it seemed to be unavoidable.
I don't know at all, by the way, what Arthur will say to this last of my English experiences; he may not consider it as 'formative' as he hoped the others would be. There is only one thing that makes the thought endurable for an instant—it would have been nice to be related to the Stacys.
Just before sailing the purser supplied me with dear consolation in the shape of a letter from Miss Peter Corke. It was a 'characteristic' letter, as we say when we want to say a thing easily—bewailing, advising, sternly questioning, comically reprobating, a little sad and deprecating by accident, then rallying to herself again with all sorts of funny reproaches. 'I meant to have done so much, and I've done so little!' was the burden of it, recurring often—'I meant to have done so much, and I've done so little!' Dear Peter! She can't possibly know how much she did do, though I'm taking my unformed mind back to a comparatively immature civilisation, and shall probably continue to attend a church where they use spring-edged cushions and incandescent burners. Peter's England will always be the true England to me. I shall be able to realise it again easily with some photographs and Hare's 'Walks in London,' though I am afraid I have got all her delightful old moss-grown facts and figures mixed up so that I couldn't write about them over again without assistance as intelligently as before. And Peter says she doesn't mind going on in my second volume, if only I won't print it; which is very good of her when one thinks that the second volume will be American, and never written at all, but only lived, very quietly, under the maples at Yale. I hope she may be found in the last chapter of that one too. Dear Peter!