of communication.  But the official who sells tickets to a hurrying crowd, or who snaps out a few tart words at a bureau of information, or who guards a gate through which men and women are pushing with senseless haste, is clad in an armour of incivility.  He is wantonly rude to foreigners, whose helplessness should make some appeal to his humanity.  I have seen a gatekeeper at Jersey City take by the shoulders a poor German, whose ticket called for another train, and shove him roughly out of the way, without a word of explanation.  The man, too bewildered for resentment, rejoined his wife to whom he had said good-bye, and the two anxious, puzzled creatures stood whispering together as the throng swept callously past them.  It was a painful spectacle, a lapse from the well-ordered decencies of civilization.

For to be civilized is to be incapable of giving unnecessary offence, it is to have some quality of consideration for all who cross our path.  An Englishwoman once said to Mr. Whistler that the politeness of the French was “all on the surface,” to which the artist made reply:  “And a very good place for it to be.”  It is this sweet surface politeness, costing so little, counting for so much, which smooths the roughness out of life.  “The classic quality of the French nation,” says Mr. Henry James, “is sociability; a sociability which operates in France, as it never does in England, from below upward.  Your waiter utters a greeting because, after all, something human within him prompts him.  His instinct bids him say something, and his taste recommends that it should be agreeable.”

This combination of instinct and taste—­which happily is not confined to the French, nor to waiters—­produces some admirable results, results out of all proportion to the slightness of the means employed.  It often takes but a word, a gesture, to indicate the delicate process of adjustment.  A few summers ago I was drinking tea with friends in the gardens of the Hotel Faloria, at Cortina.  At a table near us sat two Englishmen, three Englishwomen, and an Austrian, the wife of a Viennese councillor.  They talked with animation and in engaging accents.  After a little while they arose and strolled back to the hotel.  The Englishmen, as they passed our table, stared hard at two young girls who were of our party, stared as deliberately and with as much freedom as if the children had been on a London music-hall stage.  The Englishwomen passed us as though we had been invisible.  They had so completely the air of seeing nothing in our chairs that I felt myself a phantom, a ghost like Banquo’s, with no guilty eye to discern my presence at the table.  Lastly came the Austrian, who had paused to speak to a servant, and, as she passed, she gave us a fleeting smile and a slight bow, the mere shadow of a curtsey, acknowledging our presence as human beings, to whom some measure of recognition was due.