And the odd, queer thing is that the whole collection of rules
applies to anybody--to the anybodies that you meet in hotels, in
railway trains, to a less degree, perhaps, in steamers, but even, in
the end, upon steamers. You meet a man or a woman and, from
tiny and intimate sounds, from the slightest of movements, you
know at once whether you are concerned with good people or with
those who won't do. You know, this is to say, whether they will go
rigidly through with the whole programme from the underdone
beef to the Anglicanism. It won't matter whether they be short or
tall; whether the voice squeak like a marionette or rumble like a
town bull's; it won't matter whether they are Germans, Austrians,
French, Spanish, or even Brazilians-- they will be the Germans or
Brazilians who take a cold bath every morning and who move,
roughly speaking, in diplomatic circles.

But the inconvenient--well, hang it all, I will say it--the damnable
nuisance of the whole thing is, that with all the taking for granted,
you never really get an inch deeper than the things I have
catalogued.

I can give you a rather extraordinary instance of this. I can't
remember whether it was in our first year--the first year of us four
at Nauheim, because, of course, it would have been the fourth
year of Florence and myself--but it must have been in the first or
second year. And that gives the measure at once of the
extraordinariness of our discussion and of the swiftness with
which intimacy had grown up between us. On the one hand we
seemed to start out on the expedition so naturally and with so little
preparation, , that it was as if we must have made many such