invented--but I do, and it is with every apology that I mention it. I
once had such a good time in England that I printed my experiences, and
at the very end of the volume it seemed necessary to admit that I was
engaged to Mr. Arthur Greenleaf Page, of Yale College, Connecticut. I
remember thinking this was indiscreet at the time, but I felt compelled
to bow to the requirements of fiction. I was my own heroine, and I had
to be disposed of. There seemed to be no alternative. I did not wish to
marry Mr. Mafferton, even for literary purposes, and Peter Corke's
suggestion, that I should cast myself overboard in mid-ocean at the mere
idea of living anywhere out of England for the future, was
autobiographically impossible even if I had felt so inclined. So I
committed the indiscretion. In order that the world might be assured
that my heroine married and lived happily ever afterwards, I took it
prematurely into my confidence regarding my intention. The thing that
occurred, as naturally and inevitably as the rain if you leave your
umbrella at home, was that within a fortnight after my return to Chicago
my engagement to Mr. Page terminated; and the even more painful
consequence is that I feel obliged on that account to refer to it again.

Even an American man has his lapses into unreasonableness. Arthur
especially encouraged the idea of my going to England on the ground that
it would be so formative. He said that to gaze upon the headsman's block
in the Tower was in itself a liberal education. As we sat together in
the drawing-room--momma and poppa always preferred the sitting-room when
Arthur was there--he used to gild all our future with the culture which
I should acquire by actual contact with the hoary traditions of Great
Britain. He advised me earnestly to disembark at Liverpool in a
receptive and appreciative, rather than a critical and antagonistic,
state of mind, to endeavour to assimilate all that was worth
assimilating over there, remembering that this might give me as much as