“America for ever!” cried Isabel, swinging a newspaper about with such enthusiasm that she nearly upset the vinegar and oil bottles at her elbow. “Do you know, my respected hearers, that at this instant my country is looking across the ocean at me with a pair of eyes like two suns. There isn’t another nation on earth that she couldn’t take between her teeth and shake the life out of. Will you excuse me while I go into the other room and play and sing just one stanza of the ‘Star-spangled Banner’?”
The Signora, who was breaking lettuce in the snowy folds of a towel, smiled beamingly on the speaker, at the same time making haste to save the imperilled cruets. “Season your admiration for a while till I have made the salad,” she said. “I would rather not have my attention distracted by patriotic music. Besides, nobody sings at noon. The birds are taking their nap, and you might wake them. Besides, again, I want you to save your voice for this evening. Some American people are coming here, and it might please
them to hear the songs of their country in a strange land.”
The Americans who came that evening belonged to a party which was making a flying tour of Europe, and two of them were representatives of two distinct and extreme classes—that which scoffs at everything foreign, and that which is enchanted with everything foreign. Both were young, pretty, clever, and fairly educated, had gone through very nearly the same training, and the one had come out almost, or quite, a girl of the period, the other a girl of the past. The Signora found herself obliged, as it were, to use the curb with one hand and the whip with the other while talking with the two.
“Josephine and I are the best of friends,” said Miss Warder in her free, rapid way, “and we prove it—I by being patient with her, and she by trying my patience. The number of times in a day that girl goes into raptures over things scarcely worth looking at is almost incredible. I caught her yesterday filling a bottle with Tiber water to carry home. I believe she thinks that brook is larger than the Mississippi.”
“So it is, in one sense,” responded Miss Josephine in a soft and tranquil voice. “If you should see a little river all of tears, wouldn’t you think it more wonderful than a big river all of water?”
The Signora suggested that both might be excellent in their way.
“Then,” pursued the other, “she looks upon old families as she does on attar of roses and sandal-wood—a condensation of all that is exquisite, the rest being the refuse. Tell her that a vulgar soul often gets itself into a privileged body, and she is shocked at you. It is all I can do to keep my hands off her when I see
her watching with admiring awe the affected grandeur of these little great people. For me, I laugh at them.” And she tossed her head with the scornful laugh of the democrat, at which coronets tremble.
“My dear Miss Warder,” said the Signora in her gentlest manner, “a great many wise people have looked at these things seriously.”