Unless you are quite in the poor parts every creature in the streets is spruce and well dressed; men and women have that look of their things being brushed and ironed to the last state of perfection.  And if it is the fashion in Paris to have hats two feet across they will have them a yard; but as they all have the same, one’s eye gets accustomed to it, and it does not look ridiculous.

The longer one stays the more one admires that extraordinary quality of “go”—­a mental alertness and lucidity they have immeasurably beyond European nations; very few people are intellectual, but all are intelligent and advancing.  No one browses like such hundreds do at home, and all are much more amusing companions in consequence.

Last night we went to see China Town with Valerie’s brother and some other young men, and two or three women.  Valerie would not come because she has done it before and it bores her, and no American woman deliberately does what she finds wearisome.  They are sensible.  First we dined at the Cafe Lafayette, which is almost down town, and near Washington Square, and then started in automobiles which we left in the Bowery.  One always thought that was a kind of cut throat Whitechapel, did not one?  But it is most quiet and respectable, so is China Town, and I am sure we need not have had the two detectives who accompanied us.

Outside there is nothing very lurid to look at.  The Mayor met us at the opening of the street, a most entertaining character of what would answer to our Coster class I suppose.  He spoke pure Bowery-Irish-Coster-American slang, which the detectives translated for us.  It was about this:  That he had seen English Lords before, and they weren’t half bad when you knew ’em, and he took a particular fancy to Octavia because he said “her Nobs” (his late wife, or one of them) had red hair, too, and “ginger for pluck.”  He had several teeth missing, lost in fights, I suppose, and a perfectly delicious sense of humour.  I wish we could have understood all he said, but our host insinuated it was just as well not!  He led us first to “the theatre”—­a den underground, with the stage still lower at one end, where a Chinese play was going on.  The atmosphere was an unbelievable mixture of heat and smell.  And wouldn’t you hate to be a Chinese woman, Mamma, packed away in a sort of pen at one corner with all the other women and children and not allowed to sit with the men.  We went in there, too, for as long as we could stand it.  The audience were too quaint, not in their national dress, but ordinary clothes and pigtails; you couldn’t have been sure they were human beings, or of what sex.