Sometimes the conditions are delightfully comic, as in a well-known
case, where the daughter, who married into an indolent, happy-go-
lucky Italian family, had inherited her father's business push and
energy along with his fortune, and immediately set about "running"
her husband's estate as she had seen her father do his bank. She
tried to revive a half-forgotten industry in the district, scraped
and whitewashed their picturesque old villa, proposed her husband's
entering business, and in short dashed head down against all his
inherited traditions and national prejudices, until her new family
loathed the sight of the brisk American face, and the poor she had
tried to help, sulked in their newly drained houses and refused to
be comforted. Her ways were not Italian ways, and she seemed to
the nun-like Italian ladies, almost unsexed, as she tramped about
the fields, talking artificial manure and subsoil drainage with the
men. Yet neither she nor her husband was to blame. The young
Italian had but followed the teachings of his family, which decreed
that the only honorable way for an aristocrat to acquire wealth was
to marry it. The American wife honestly tried to do her duty in
this new position, naively thinking she could engraft transatlantic
"go" upon the indolent Italian character. Her work was in vain;
she made herself and her husband so unpopular that they are now
living in this country, regretting too late the error of their
ways.

Another case but little less laughable, is that of a Boston girl
with a neat little fortune of her own, who, when married to the
young Viennese of her choice, found that he expected her to live
with his family on the third floor of their "palace" (the two lower
floors being rented to foreigners), and as there was hardly enough
money for a box at the opera, she was not expected to go, whereas