is the topic you wish us to treat?"

"Oh," he said, rising, "you have put it quite out of my head; I've been
so absorbed in what you were saying. But may I ask just where in your
treatment of the theme your irony ends?"

"Where yours begins," we neatly responded.

VIII

HAVING JUST GOT HOME

The air of having just got home from Europe was very evident in the
friend who came to interview himself with us the other day. It was not,
of course, so distinguishing as it would have been in an age of less
transatlantic travel, but still, as we say, it was evident, and it lent
him a superiority which he could not wholly conceal. His superiority, so
involuntary, would, if he had wished to dissemble, have affirmed itself
in the English cut of his clothes and in the habit of his top-hat, which
was so newly from a London shop as not yet to have lost the whiteness of
its sweat-band. But his difference from ourselves appeared most in a
certain consciousness of novel impressions, which presently escaped from
him in the critical tone of his remarks.

"Well," we said, with our accustomed subtlety, "how do you find your
fellow-savages on returning to them after a three months' absence?"

"Don't ask me yet," he answered, laying his hat down on a pile of
rejected MSS., delicately, so as not to dim the lustre of its nap. "I am
trying to get used to them, and I have no doubt I shall succeed in time.
But I would rather not be hurried in my opinions."

"You find some relief from the summer's accumulation of sky-scrapers
amid the aching void of our manners?" we suggested.

"Oh, the fresh sky-scrapers are not so bad. You won't find the English
objecting to them half so much as some of our own fellows. But you are
all right about the aching void of manners. That is truly the bottomless
pit with us."

"You think we get worse?"

"I don't say that, exactly. How could we?"

"It might be difficult."

"I will tell you what," he said, after a moment's muse. "There does not
seem to be so much an increase of bad manners, or no manners, as a
diffusion. The foreigners who come to us in hordes, but tolerably civil
hordes, soon catch the native unmannerliness, and are as rude as the
best of us, especially the younger generations. The older people,
Italians, Czechs, Poles, Greeks, Assyrians, or whatever nationalities
now compose those hordes, remain somewhat in the tradition of their home
civility; but their children, their grandchildren,