uestions are too difficult. One asked me whether the American
drama was structurally inferior to the French. I don't call that fair. I
told him I didn't know; that I used to know the answer to it when I was
at college, but that I had forgotten it, and that, anyway, I am too well
off now to need to remember it.

That question is only one of a long list that they asked me about art
and literature. I missed nearly all of them, except one as to whether I
thought Al Jolson or Frank Tinney was the higher artist, and even that
one was asked by an American who is wasting himself on the London Press.

I don't want to speak in anger. But I say it frankly, the atmosphere
of these young men is not healthy, and I felt that I didn't want to see
them any more.

Had there been a reporter of the kind we have at home in Montreal or
Toledo or Springfield, Illinois, I would have welcomed him at my hotel.
He could have taken me out in a Ford car and shown me a factory and told
me how many cubic feet of water go down the Thames in an hour. I should
have been glad of his society, and he and I would have together made up
the kind of copy that people of his class and mine read. But I felt that
if any young man came along to ask about the structure of the modern
drama, he had better go on to the British Museum.

Meantime as the reporters entirely failed to elicit the large fund of
information which I acquired, I reserve my impressions of London for a
chapter by themselves.

III. Impressions of London

BEFORE setting down my impressions of the great English metropolis; a
phrase which I have thought out as a designation for London; I think it
proper to offer an initial apology. I find that I receive impressions
with great difficulty and have nothing of that easy facility in picking
them up which is shown by British writers on America. I remember Hugh
Walpole telling me that he could hardly walk down Broadway without
getting at least three dollars' worth and on Fifth Avenue five dollars'
worth; and I recollect that St. John Ervine came up to my house in
Montreal, drank a cup of tea, borrowed some tobacco, and got away with
sixty dollars' worth of impressions of Canadian life and character.

For this kind of thing I have only a despairing admiration. I can get an
impression if I am given time and can think about it beforehand. But
it requires thought. This fact was all the more distressing to me in as
much as one of the leading editors