We are that kind of men.  Wichita and Emporia are written large and indelibly upon us; and the Ritz, which is the rendezvous of the nobility, merely becomes a background for our rusticity—­the spotlight which reveals the everlasting jay in us!  We went to the Ritz largely because it seemed to me that as a leading American orator, Henry should have proper European terminal facilities.  And the Ritz looked to me like the proper setting for an international figure.  There, it seemed to me, the rich and the great would congregate to invite him to dinners, and to me, at least, who had imagination, there seemed something rather splendid in fancying the gentry saying, “Ah, yes—­Henry J. Allen, of Wichita—­the next governor of Kansas, I understand!” Henry indicated his feeling about the Ritz thus:  The night we arrived he failed, for the first time in two weeks, to demand a dress rehearsal in our $17.93 uniforms from 43rd Street in New York.  The gold braided uniforms that we saw in the corridors of the Ritz that night made us pause and consider many things.  When we unpacked our valises, there were the little bundles just as they had come from 43rd Street.  Henry tucked his away with a sigh, and just before he went to sleep he called across the widening spaces between sleep and wakening:  “I suppose we might have bought that $23.78 outfit, easy enough!”

It was in the morning that the veneer of the Ritz began to wear off for Henry.  He had pulled a bath and found it cold; they were conserving fuel and no hot water was allowed in the hotels of Paris excepting Friday and Saturday nights.  The English, who are naturally mean, declare that the French save seventy-five per cent of the use of their hot water by putting the two hot water nights together, as no living Frenchman ever took a bath two consecutive days.  But it did not seem that way to Henry and me.  And anyway we heard these theories later.  But that morning Henry, who doesn’t really mind a cold bath, was ready for it when he happened to look around the bathroom and found there wasn’t a scrap of soap.  There he was, as one might say, au natural, or perhaps better—­if one should include the dripping from his first plunge—­one might say he was au jus!  And what is more, he was au mad.  He jabbed the bell button that summoned the valet, and when the boy appeared Henry had his speech ready for him.  “Donnez moi some soap here and be mighty blame toot sweet about it!” The valet explained that soap was not furnished with the room.  It took some time to get that across in broken French and English; then Henry, talking very slowly and in his best oratorical voice, with his foot on the fortissimo, cried:  “Say!  We are paying,” at the dazed look in the valet’s face Henry repeated slower and louder, “We are paying, I say, fifteen-dollars—­fif-teen dollars a day for these rooms.  You go ask Mrs. Ritz if she will furnish soap for twenty?” And he waved the valet grandly out.

[Illustration with caption:  “Donnez moi some soap here and be mighty blame toot sweet about it!”]