on deck in my sea-chair, with my heels up, reading Tauchnitz novels.
There was a great lot of people, but no one in particular, save some
fifty American girls. You know all about the American girl,
however, having been one yourself. They are, on the whole, very
nice, but fifty is too many; there are always too many. There was
an inquiring Briton, a radical M.P., by name Mr. Antrobus, who
entertained me as much as any one else. He is an excellent man; I
even asked him to come down here and spend a couple of days. He
looked rather frightened, till I told him he shouldn't be alone with
me, that the house was my brother's, and that I gave the invitation
in his name. He came a week ago; he goes everywhere; we have heard
of him in a dozen places. The English are very simple, or at least
they seem so over here. Their old measurements and comparisons
desert them; they don't know whether it's all a joke, or whether
it's too serious by half. We are quicker than they, though we talk
so much more slowly. We think fast, and yet we talk as deliberately
as if we were speaking a foreign language. They toss off their
sentences with an air of easy familiarity with the tongue, and yet
they misunderstand two-thirds of what people say to them. Perhaps,
after all, it is only OUR thoughts they think slowly; they think
their own often to a lively tune enough. Mr. Antrobus arrived here
at eight o'clock in the morning; I don't know how he managed it; it
appears to be his favourite hour; wherever we have heard of him he
has come in with the dawn. In England he would arrive at 5.30 p.m.
He asks innumerable questions, but they are easy to answer, for he
has a sweet credulity. He made me rather ashamed; he is a better
American than so many of us; he takes us more seriously than we take
ourselves. He seems to think that an oligarchy of wealth is growing
up here, and he advised me to be on my guard against it. I don't
know exactly what I can do, but I promised him to look out. He is