Part 17

I should never have managed the green corn, which grows like lots of pearls set close together in rows on a fat stick, if Mr. Parker hadn't scraped all the pearls off for me, with a fork, and put butter and salt on them. I liked him a little better after that, for he did the thing with great skill. When I had got so far, nothing could surprise me, and I didn't turn a hair when I found that I was expected to eat pears cut up with salad oil. But they were alligator pears, and when you tasted them, it appeared that they had nothing whatever to do with the fruit kingdom. Best of all, I liked the watermelon which came at the end, cut in little balls, looking like strawberry water ice, and soaked in champagne. I hope that all the things to eat in America won't be so nice, or I may grow stout before I go back; and Vic says it is better for a girl to hang herself.

It was very trying, too, to find that I was keeping every course waiting. I've never been accused of greediness at home, though I've often been made to feel guilty of most other sins in the calendar, but I did feel queer when I began to realise that everybody else had finished what was on their plates, when I'd just about discovered what the thing was. It made me so uncomfortable to see them all leaning back waiting for me, after their plates had been whisked away, that I took to bolting the rest of my food, and by the time we'd got rid of nine courses in about half an hour I felt qualified to write the autobiography of an anaconda.

As for the iced water, I had intended to refuse it at any cost, because Vic and Mother both solemnly warned me that it made all the difference between a complexion and mere skin. But the minute I landed, I began thinking hard about iced water, and I soon discovered that when you are in America a comparatively small consideration like a complexion would never keep you from drinking it. In fact, nothing would. You feel as if you must drink iced water, pints of iced water, in rapid succession, if not only your complexion, but your whole face were to be swept away in the deluge. Once you have got the taste nothing can quench it but iced water, more iced water, and still more iced water!

After dinner, while we were having heavenly Turkish coffee in the fountain court, who should come but Mr. Doremus. It seemed to me a funny time to call, but apparently the others didn't think it out of the way. He wanted us to go to some theatre on a roof, and I should have loved it, especially when Mrs. Ess Kay said you didn't get smudges on your nose as you would if you sat on a roof in London--a thing which I never heard of anybody except cats doing. But she was tired, and I suppose it would have been ladylike for me to be, only I was much too excited. So Mr. Doremus stayed, and he and Mr. Parker talked more slang in an hour than I think I ever heard in my whole life, though I have always considered Stan talented in that way.

But Stan's slang, and Vic's, are quite different from American slang. In America, you build up your whole conversation out of it, and it's wonderful. I longed for a notebook while those two men were talking, to put everything down, and I felt, if people were often going to be as funny as that, I should need to go home soon to rest my features. I'm not sure whether Americans really think funnier things than English people do, but their funny ideas are startlingly unlike ours. Somehow they seem younger and more bubbling. When I go home, I shall probably have collected so much slang in my pores that I shall talk about putting on my "glad rags" when I'm going to dress for dinner; my life will be my "natural"; I shall call Stan's motor car the Blue Assassin or the Homicide Wagon; I shall say my best frocks are "mighty conducive"; I shall get bored by poor Mr. Duckworth, our newest curate, and tell him he's "the limit"; I may even take to abbreviating my affirmatives and negatives by saying "Yep" and "Nope" when I'm in a hurry; but if I do fall into these ways, I tremble to think what may be the effect on Mother.

ABOUT SHOPPING AND MEN

"Why, Betty, you never told me you were interviewed on the dock." These were the first words Mrs. Ess Kay said to me as I walked in to breakfast, a little late because of a wrestle I had had with a different and even more exciting kind of bath.

"I wasn't," said I, on the defensive; though I couldn't be perfectly sure what connection, if any, interviewing had with the Customs. "You told me not to declare anything, and I didn't."

Mr. Parker, looking as if he had been melted, poured into his clothes, and then cooled off with iced water, burst out laughing.

"You're a daisy, Lady Betty," said he.

"Is it invidious to be a daisy?" I asked.

"I guess I must look in the dictionary for 'invidious'; but a daisy's a flower that has budded in the green fields of England, where there aren't any newspaper reporters or other strange bugs."

"Potter!" exclaimed Mrs. Ess Kay, "don't tease her; and when you've been in the green fields of England you'll say insects, not--er--what you did say, if you don't want ladies to faint all around you on the floor." Then she turned to me. "He means you're very innocent, because you don't know what it is to be interviewed. But you must have been it, all the same, for see here, in this dreadful Flashlight." And she handed me a newspaper, with one page folded over, and huge headings dotted about at the tops of paragraphs, like the lines of big print that oculists keep to make you try your eyesight. In the middle column I saw my name, but I couldn't believe it was really there, in an American paper. I began to think I wasn't awake yet, and that this must be part of the dream I was dreaming all yesterday.

"BONNY--BETTY--BULKELEY," I read out aloud. "A Duke's Daughter on the Dock. Call Her by Her Front Name, Please. What Lady Betty Thinks of Our Boys."

There was more, but when I had got so far, I simply gasped.

"How dare they?"

"There isn't much they don't dare, except to go back without a 'story'," said Mr. Parker, laughing. But I didn't laugh. I was too angry.

"If my brother were here, he'd kill them," I said.

"Then he hasn't got a sense of humour," replied Mr. Parker; "I don't see how a Duke could have, and be a Duke nowadays; but I guess I wouldn't mind swopping my sense of humour for a dukedom, all the same. See here, Lady Betty, you'll get to like our newspapers before you've been over here a month. They sort of grow on you. They're as interesting as novels, and almost as true to life."

"This isn't true to my life, anyway," I said, not knowing whether I wanted most to laugh or cry. "Oh, Sally, Sally Woodburn, will anybody believe I said such things as these?"

"Give the Flashlight to me and let me look," she said. And when she'd taken the paper, she began to read the stuff that came under the big headings, out aloud, in her pretty, soft voice.

"Yesterday was a blazer, but though it was hot enough on the docks to roast a coon, when the Big Willie steamed in, that beautiful young visitor to our shores, Lady Betty Bulkeley, managed to look like the Duke's daughter and Duke's sister she is, and so far as a mere man could tell, without the help of patent hair curlers, or other artificial aids to personal pulchritude.

"A daughter of the gods, divinely tall and most divinely fair, she sat on a throne of ducal luggage, looking queenly in an elegant white shirt waist, built mostly of holes and eminently suited to her style of beauty as well as the weather. She also had on a picture hat, which was superfluous as she would have been a picture without it, and below the waist she was tailor made."

"I think it's most insulting!" I broke in. "And I was made at home, all the way down."

But Sally went on: "I soon found [writes the representative of The Flashlight] that the sister of the Duke of Stanforth, one of Britain's eligibles, preferred to be addressed by her Front name of Lady Betty. 'I feel more at home,' said she, with a sweet voice, but a pronounced English accent, 'when I am called Lady Betty. And I want to feel at home in America, because I expect to be some time with my friend, Mrs. Stuyvesant-Knox, who will show me society over on this side. I have heard so much about Newport, don't you know? I fancy it will be too utterly deevy.'"

"What's deevy?" I demanded with scorn.

"Oh, that's supposed to be what smart Englishwomen say for divine."

"I never heard it," I sneered, "much less said it. I'm sure Mother would consider it quite profane."