But in Russia I have a sore throat all the time from answering questions about America.  I think I am not exaggerating when I say I have answered a million in a single evening.  My companion at first was disgusted with my wearing myself out in such a manner, but I said, “I am so grateful to them for caring, after the indifference of all these other self-sufficient countries, that I am willing to sacrifice myself at it if necessary.”

We never realized how little we knew about America until we discovered the Russian capacity for asking unexpected questions.  I bought an American history in Russia, and sat up nights trying to remember what my father had tried to instil into my sieve-like brain.  After a week of witnessing my feverish enthusiasm, even my companion’s dormant national pride was roused.  She, too, was ashamed to say, “I don’t know,” when they asked us these terrible questions.  When we get into the clutches of a party of women we trust to luck that they cannot remember our statistics long enough to tell their husbands and brothers (I have a horror of men’s accuracy in figures), and we calmly guess at the answers when our exact knowledge gives out.

One night they attacked my companion on the school question.  Now, she does not know one solitary thing about the public-school system, but, to my utter amazement, I heard her giving the number of children between the ages of eight and ten who were in the public schools in the State of Illinois, and then running them off by counties.  I was afraid she would soon begin to call the roll of their names from memory, so I rescued her and took her home.  I suppose we must have an air of intelligence which successfully masks our colossal ignorance of occult facts and defunct dates, because they rely on us to inform them off-hand concerning everything social, political, historical, sacred and profane, spirituous and spiritual, from the protoplasm of the cliff-dwellers to the details of the Dingley bill, not skipping accurate information on the process of whiskey-making in Kentucky, a crocodile-hunt in Florida, suffrage in Wyoming, a lynching-bee in Texas, polygamy in Utah, prune-drying in California, divorces in Dakota, gold-mining in Colorado, cotton-spinning in Georgia, tobacco-raising in Alabama, marble-quarrying in Tennessee, the number of Quakers in Philadelphia, one’s sensations while being scalped by Sioux, how marriages are arranged, what a man says when he proposes, the details of a camp-meeting, a description of a negro baptism, and the main arguments on the silver question.

They get some curious ideas in their heads concerning us, but they are so amazingly well informed about America that their specific misinformation never irritated me.  The small use they have for their English sometimes accounts for the queer things they say.

The official costume for men who have no particular uniform is regulation evening dress, which they are obliged to wear all day.  They become so tired of it that this is the reason, they tell me, why so many men, even in smart society, go to the opera or even dinners in frock-coats.  One one occasion a most intelligent man said to me, “I am told that in America the ladies always wear decollete costumes at dinners, and the men are always in night-dress.”