“I don’t believe,” he said, “that I recognize-any celebrities here.”

“I’m sorry,” said March.  “Mrs. March would have been glad of some Hoheits, some Grafs and Grafins, or a few Excellenzes, or even some mere well-borns.  But we must try to get along with the picturesqueness.”

“I’m satisfied with the picturesqueness,” said his wife.  “Don’t worry about me, Mr. Burnamy.”

“Why can’t we have this sort of thing at home?”

“We’re getting something like it in the roof-gardens,” said March.  “We couldn’t have it naturally because the climate is against it, with us.  At this time in the morning over there, the sun would be burning the life out of the air, and the flies would be swarming on every table.  At nine A. M. the mosquitoes would be eating us up in such a grove as this.  So we have to use artifice, and lift our Posthof above the fly-line and the mosquito-line into the night air.  I haven’t seen a fly since I came to Europe.  I really miss them; it makes me homesick.”

“There are plenty in Italy,” his wife suggested.

“We must get down there before we go home.”

“But why did nobody ever tell us that there were no flies in Germany?  Why did no traveller ever put it in his book?  When your stewardess said so on the steamer, I remember that you regarded it as a bluff.”  He turned to Burnamy, who was listening with the deference of a contributor:  “Isn’t Lili rather long?  I mean for such a very prompt person.  Oh, no!”

But Burnamy got to his feet, and shouted “Fraulein!” to Lili; with her hireling at her heels she was flying down a distant aisle between the tables.  She called back, with a face laughing over her shoulder, “In a minute!” and vanished in the crowd.

“Does that mean anything in particular?  There’s really no hurry.”

“Oh, I think she’ll come now,” said Burnamy.  March protested that he had only been amused at Lili’s delay; but his wife scolded him for his impatience; she begged Burnamy’s pardon, and repeated civilities passed between them.  She asked if he did not think some of the young ladies were pretty beyond the European average; a very few had style; the mothers were mostly fat, and not stylish; it was well not to regard the fathers too closely; several old gentlemen were clearing their throats behind their newspapers, with noises that made her quail.  There was no one so effective as the Austrian officers, who put themselves a good deal on show, bowing from their hips to favored groups; with the sun glinting from their eyeglasses, and their hands pressing their sword-hilts, they moved between the tables with the gait of tight-laced women.

“They all wear corsets,” Burnamy explained.

“How much you know already!” said Mrs. March.  “I can see that Europe won’t be lost on you in anything.  Oh, who’s that?” A lady whose costume expressed saris at every point glided up the middle aisle of the grove with a graceful tilt.  Burnamy was silent.  “She must be an American.  Do you know who she is?”