" The Americans are
suspicious of servile adulation from a stranger, yet are very sensitive
to criticism.
"These gentlemen want to have a few words with you," said Henry to me
when the reporters had done with him. Then with a mischievous expression
he whispered: "Say something pleasant! Merry and bright!"
Merry and bright! I felt it! The sense of being a stranger entering a
strange land, the rushing sense of loneliness and foreignness was
overpowering my imagination. I blew my nose hard and tried to keep back
my tears, but the first reporter said: "Can I send any message to your
friends in England?"
I answered: "Tell them I never loved 'em so much as now," and burst into
tears! No wonder that he wrote in his paper that I was "a woman of
extreme nervous sensibility." Another of them said that "my figure was
spare almost to attenuation." America soon remedied that. I began to put
on flesh before I had been in the country a week, and it was during my
fifth American tour that I became really fat for the first time in my
life.
When we landed I drove to the Hotel Dam, Henry to the Brevoort House.
There was no Diana on the top of the Madison Square Building then. The
building did not exist, to cheer the heart of a new arrival as the first
evidence of _beauty_ in the city.
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