girls
ever got an advantage of her; she had more custom than any three of them,
and she had hired a man to help her carry her orders. The girls were all
from the neighboring villages, he said, and they lived at home in the
winter on their summer tips; their wages were nothing, or less, for
sometimes they paid for their places.

"What a mass of information!" said March. "How did you come by it?"

"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, an