“I think the American ‘man of the world’ is much more objectionable. He is so horribly raw that he can’t help boasting openly, and the American woman flatters him, openly. It’s extraordinary. I mean the kind of heavy-featured fat middle-aged American woman who doesn’t smoke and thinks that voting would be unseemly for women. It used to make me simply ill with fury. … Dr. Bunyan Hopkinson’s brother came over for July and August two years ago. He was appalling. With a bright fair beard, and a most frightful twang; the worst I’ve ever heard. He used to talk incessantly, as if the whole table were waiting for his ideas. And knew everything, in the most awful superficial newspaper way. They have absolutely no souls at all. I never saw an American soul. The Canadians have. The Americans, at least the women, have reproachful ideals that they all agree about. So that they are all like one person; all the same effect. But wasn’t it screaming , Bunyan Hopkinson’s brother was called Bacchus . Yes. Did you ever hear anything so screaming? Isn’t that enough? Doesn’t it explain everything? He was a doctor too. He sat next to an elderly woman who was always scolding and preaching. She had an enormous American figure, and Guelph eyelids and Guelph cheeks coming down below her chin making great lengthways furrows on either side of it. But when Dr. Bacchus began to talk about Paris she would listen respectfully. He used always to be offering to show other men round Paris. There’s no-one alive, he would say, can show me anything in Parrus nightlife I’ve not seen. Ah , she would say, anyone can see you’re a man of the world , doctor. It spoils the very idea of those little cabarets and whatever awful haunts there may be in Paris to think of Americans there, seeing nothing .”
“They have certainly a most remarkable naivety.”
“I’ve today seen your Queen. She’s just a vurry hoamely little old lady.”
“What? What is that?”