Raymond's "tower" was not static, but peripatetic. Early in his second summer abroad it was standing among the Dutch windmills for a brief season; and when he learned that I was to have a short vacation in England—the only quarter of the Old World I ever cared for—he left it altogether for a fortnight and came across from Flushing to see me.

Two points immediately made themselves clear. Firstly, he was viewing the world through literature—through works of fiction in some cases, through guide-books in more. Everything was a spectacle, with himself quite outside as an onlooker; and nothing was a spectacle until it had been ranged and appraised in print. Secondly, if he was outside of things, America was still farther outside; it existed as a remote province not yet drawn into the activities and interests of the "world." He seemed willing, even anxious, to make himself secondary, subordinate. However he may have been on the Continent, here in England his desire to conform made him appear subservient and almost abject. My own unabashed and unconscious Americanism—the possible consequence of inexperience—sometimes embarrassed him, and he occasionally undertook to edit my dealings with members of the older half of our race, even with waiters and cabmen. As for the more boastful, aggressive, self-assertive sort of Americanism, that would make him tremble with anger and blush for shame.

I will say this in his behalf, however: he did not like England and was not at home there.

"The little differences," he observed, one day, "made more trouble than the big ones. A minor seventh is all right, while a minor second is distressing. I am happier among the Latins."

Yet I am sure that even among his Latins he took the purely objective view and valued their objects of interest according as they were starred and double-starred, or left unmarked in the comparative neglect of small print.

We saw together Canterbury and Cambridge and Brighton and a few other approved places. Through all these he walked with a meticulous circumspection, wondering what people thought, asking inwardly if he were squaring with their ideas of what conduct should be. Only once did I find him fully competent and sufficiently assertive. The incident occurred on a late afternoon, in a small side street just off the Strand, while I was casting about for one of those letter-pillars. Raymond was approached, as was proper to the locality and the time of day, by a young woman of thirty who had a hard, determined face and who was clothed on with a rustling black dress that jingled with jet. I was near enough to hear.

"Good-afternoon," she said.

"Good-afternoon."

"Where," with marked expressiveness, "are you going?"

"I'm going to stand right here."

"Give me a drink."

"Couldn't think of it."

"Stand," she said, with sudden viciousness, "stand and rot!"

Raymond, after an instant's surprise, made a response in his unstudied vernacular. "Yes, I'll stand; but you skip. Shoo!"

She was preparing some retort, but he waved both his hands, wide out, as if starting a ruffled, vindictive hen across a highway. At the same time he caught sight of a constable on the corner, and let her see that he saw—

"Constable!"—why, I am as bad as Raymond himself: I mean, of course, policeman.

But the London police are sometimes chary in the exercise of their functions. What really started the woman on her way was his next brief remark, accompanied by the hands, as before, though with a more decided shade of propulsion.

"Scoot!" She went, without words.

These were the only American observations I heard from Raymond during that fortnight.

I wish he had been as successful on the night of our arrival in London when we encountered, in the court behind the big gilded grille of the Grand Metropole, the porter of that grandiose establishment. We had come together from Harwich and did not reach this hotel until half an hour before midnight. We had had our things put on the pavement and had dismissed the cab, and the porter, with an airy, tentative insolence, now reported the place full.

"I don't know who ordered your luggage down, sir; I didn't," he said with a smile that was an experiment in disrespect.

Raymond looked as if he were for immediately adjusting himself to this—though I could hardly imagine his ever having done the like in Paris or in Florence. He was quite willing to confess himself in the wrong: yes, he ought to have remembered that the "season" was beginning; he ought to have known that this particular season, though young, had set in with uncommon vigor; he ought to have known that all the hotels, even the largest, were likely to be crowded and have sent on a wire. The porter, emboldened by the departure of the cab, and by my companion's contrite silence, began to embroider the theme.

Now a single week in England had taught me that no two men in that country—the home of political but not of social democracy—are likely to talk long on even terms. One man must almost necessarily take the upper hand and leave to the other the lower, and the relation must be reached early. I resolved on the upper—cab or no cab. I glared—as well and as coldly as I could. The fellow was only a year or so older than I.

"You are too chatty," I said. "Fewer words and more action. If you are full, call somebody to take us and our baggage to some hotel near by that is not full."

The fellow sobered down and gave us his first look resembling respect.

"Very good, sir. I will, sir. Thank you, sir,"—though he had nothing to thank me for, and though he well knew there was to be nothing.

Raymond looked at me as one looks at a friend who surprises by the sudden disclosure of some unexpected talent or power.

"But you said 'baggage,'" he commented.

"Indeed I did," said I.