Ch. 2: June - Page 2

disinfected; it has just that
kind of rather awful cleanness.

At dinner they talk of its beauty and its perfections till I nearly go
to sleep. You know how oddly sleepy one gets when one isn't
interested. They've left off being silent now, and have gone to the
other extreme, and from not talking to me at all have jumped to talking
to me all together. They tell me over and over again that I'm in the
most beautiful city in the world. You never knew such eagerness and
persistence as these German boarders have when it comes to praising
what is theirs, and also when it comes to criticizing what isn't
theirs. They're so funny and personal. They say, for instance, London
is too hideous for words, and then they look at me defiantly, as though
they had been insulting some personal defect of mine and meant to
brazen it out. They point out the horrors of the slums to me as though
the slums were on my face. They tell me pityingly what they look like,
what terrible blots and deformities they are, and how I--they say
England, but no one could dream from their manner that it wasn't
me--can never hope to be regarded as fit for self-respecting European
society while these spots and sore places are not purged away.

The other day they assured me that England as a nation is really unfit
for any decent other nation to know politically, but they added, with
stiff bows in my direction, that sometimes the individual inhabitant of
that low-minded and materialistic country is not without amiability,
especially if he or she is by some miracle without the lofty,
high-nosed manner that as a rule so regrettably characterizes the
unfortunate people. "_Sie sind so hochnasig_," the bank clerk who sits
opposite me had shouted out, pointing an accusing finger at me; and for
a moment I was so startled that I thought something disastrous had
happened to my nose, and my anxious hand flew up to it. Then they
laughed; and it was after that that they made the speech conceding
individual amiability here and there.

I sit neatly in my chair while this sort of talk goes on--and it goes
on at every meal now that they have got over the preliminary stage of
icy coldness towards me--and I try to be sprightly, and bandy my six
German words about whenever they seem appropriate. Imagine your poor
Chris trying to be sprightly with eleven Germans--no, ten Germans, for
the eleventh is a Swede and doesn't say anything. And the ten Germans,
including Frau Berg, all fix their eyes reproachfully on me while as
one man they tell me how awful my country is. Do people in London
boarding houses tell the German boarders how awful Germany is, I
wonder? I don't believe they do. And I wish they would leave me alone
about the Boer war. I've tried