“Perhaps it is better to be born in America than in—­most places,” she said, with a half glance at the prim square outside.  “It gives you a point of view that is—­splendid.”  In hesitating this way before her adjectives, she always made her listeners doubly attentive to what she had to say.  “And having been deprived of so much that you have over here, we like it better, of course, when we get it, than you do.  But nobody would live in constant deprivation.  No, you wouldn’t like living there.  Except in New York, and, oh, I should say Santa Barbara, and New Orleans perhaps, the life over there is—­infernal.”

“You are like a shower-bath,” said Janet to herself; but the shower-bath had no palpable effect upon her.  “What have we that is so important that you haven’t got?” she asked.

“Quantities of things.”  Elfrida hesitated, not absolutely sure of the wisdom of her example.  Then she ventured it.  “The picturesqueness of society—­your duchesses and your women in the green-grocers’ shops.”  It was not wise, she saw instantly.

“Really?  It is so difficult to understand that duchesses are interesting—­out of novels; and the green-grocers’ wives are a good deal alike, too, aren’t they?”

“It’s the contrast; you see our duchesses were green-grocers’ wives the day before yesterday, and our green-grocers’ wives subscribe to the magazines.  It’s all mixed up, and there are no high lights anywhere.  You move before us in a sort of panoramic pageant,” Elfrida went on, determined to redeem her point, “with your Queen and Empress of India—­she ought to be riding on an elephant, oughtn’t she?—­in front, and all your princes and nobles with their swords drawn to protect her.  Then your Upper Classes and your Upper Middle Classes walking stiffly two and two; and then your Lower Middle Classes with large families, dropping their h’s; and then your hideous people from the slums.  And besides,” she added, with prettily repressed enthusiasm, “there is the shadowy procession of all the people that have gone before, and we can see that you are a good deal like them, though they are more interesting still.  It is very pictorial.”  She stopped suddenly and consciously, as if she had said too much, and Janet felt that she was suggestively apologized to.

“Doesn’t the phenomenal squash make up for all that?” she asked.  “It would to me.  I’m dying to see the phenomenal squash, and the prodigious water-melon, and—­”

“And the falls of Niagara?” Elfrida put in, with the faintest turning down of the corners of her mouth.  “I’m afraid our wonders are chiefly natural, and largely vegetable, as you say.”

“But they are wonders.  Everything here has been measured so many times.  Besides, haven’t you got the elevated railway, and a statue of Liberty, and the ‘Jeanne d’Arc,’ and W. D. Howells!  To say nothing of a whole string of poets—­good gray poets that wear beards and laurels, and fanciful young ones that dance in garlands on the back pages of the Century.  Oh, I know them all, the dear things!  And I’m quite sure their ideas are indigenous to the soil.”