“Newspaper habit of interviewing the universe.”

“It’s not a bad habit, if one doesn’t carry it too far.  How did Lili learn her English?”

“She takes lessons in the winter.  She’s a perfect little electric motor.  I don’t believe any Yankee girl could equal her.”

“She would expect to marry a millionaire if she did.  What astonishes one over here is to see how contentedly people prosper along on their own level.  And the women do twice the work of the men without expecting to equal them in any other way.  At Pupp’s, if we go to one end of the out-door restaurant, it takes three men to wait on us:  one to bring our coffee or tea, another to bring our bread and meat, and another to make out our bill, and I have to tip all three of them.  If we go to the other end, one girl serves us, and I have to give only one fee; I make it less than the least I give any three of the men waiters.”

“You ought to be ashamed of that,” said his wife.

“I’m not.  I’m simply proud of your sex, my dear.”

“Women do nearly everything, here,” said Burnamy, impartially.  “They built that big new Kaiserbad building:  mixed the mortar, carried the hods, and laid the stone.”

“That makes me prouder of the sex than ever.  But come, Mr. Burnamy!  Isn’t there anybody of polite interest that you know of in this crowd?”

“Well, I can’t say,” Burnamy hesitated.

The breakfasters had been thronging into the grove and the galleries; the tables were already filled, and men were bringing other tables on their heads, and making places for them, with entreaties for pardon everywhere; the proprietor was anxiously directing them; the pretty serving-girls were running to and from the kitchen in a building apart with shrill, sweet promises of haste.  The morning sun fell broken through the leaves on the gay hats and dresses of the ladies, and dappled the figures of the men with harlequin patches of light and shade.  A tall woman, with a sort of sharpened beauty, and an artificial permanency of tint in her cheeks and yellow hair, came trailing herself up the sun-shot path, and found, with hardy insistence upon the publicity, places for the surly-looking, down-faced young man behind her, and for her maid and her black poodle; the dog was like the black poodle out of Faust.  Burnamy had heard her history; in fact, he had already roughed out a poem on it, which he called Europa, not after the old fable, but because it seemed to him that she expressed Europe, on one side of its civilization, and had an authorized place in its order, as she would not have had in ours.  She was where she was by a toleration of certain social facts which corresponds in Europe to our reverence for the vested interests.  In her history there, had been officers and bankers; even foreign dignitaries; now there was this sullen young fellow . . . .  Burnamy had wondered if it would do to offer his poem to March, but the presence of the original abashed him, and in his mind he had torn the poem up, with a heartache for its aptness.