People of Destiny: Americans as I saw them at Home and Abroad

n to be. I find an untiring interest in this, and prefer to sit in a French café, for example, watching the people who come in and out, and hearing scraps of conversation th

their little social habits. In that way one gets a sense of the social drama of a country and of the national ideals and purpose. So when I went to the United States after four and a half years in the war zone, where I had been watching another kind of drama, hideous and horrible in

cheerily and did not take up much time when they set me up like a lay-figure on the boat deck, turned on the "movie"-machine, snap-shotted me from various angles, and offered me American cigarettes as a sign of comradeship. I met many other newspaper men and women in the United States; those who control the power of the press-the masters of the machine which shapes the mind of peoples-and those who

a lecture, because he had it all in his memory, and wrote the entire history of everything I had seen and thought through years of war, in next day's paper. I liked a young Harvard man who came to see me in Boston. He had a modesty and a winning manner which made me rack my brains to tell him something good, and I admired his type, so clean and boyish and quick in intelligence. He belonged to the stuff of young America, as I saw it in the fields of France, eager for service whatever the risk. I met the editorial staffs of many newspapers, and was given a luncheon by the proprietor and editors of one great newspaper in New York which is perhaps the biggest power in the United States to-day. All the men round me were literary types, and I saw in their faces the imprint of hard thought, and of hard work more strenuous, I imagine, than in the newspaper life of any other country of the world. They all had an absorbing interest in the international situation a

BOREDOM AFTE

ntable breakdown in transport organization, never received many of the gifts sent to them by women old and young whose eyes and fingers ached with so much stitching during the long evenings of war. Apart altogether from war-work, American women have made themselves the better halves of men, and the men know it and are deferential to the opinions and desires of their women-folk. It is natural that women should have a wider knowledge of literature and ideas in a scheme of life where men have their noses down to the grindstone of work for long hours every day. That is what most American husbands have to do in a struggle for existence which strives up to the possession of a Ford car, generally known as a "Tin Lizzie" or a "Flivver," on the way to a Cadillac or a Packard, a country cottage on Long Island or the Connecticut shore, an occa

or some little time after that the telephone is kept busy at both ends, and, with a cigarette threatening to burn a Buhl cabinet, the lady of leisure talks to several friends in New York, answers a call from the Western Union, and receives a night-letter sent over the wire. "No, I am absolutely engaged on Monday, dear. Tuesday? So sorry I am fixed up that day, too. Yes, and Thursday is quite out of the question. Friday? Oh, hell, make it Monday, then!" That is a well-worn New York joke, and I found it funny and true to life, because it is as difficult to avoid invitations in New York as collisions in Fifth Avenue. There is a little red book on the Buhl cabinet in which the American lady puts down her engagements and the excuses she gave for breaking others (it is useful to remember those), and she calculates that as far as the present day's work is planned she will have time to finish the new novel by John

er conversation at the dinner-table sparkling, and the men-folk are conscious that she knows more than they do about current literature and international history. She has her dates right, within a century or two, in any talk about medieval England, and she knows who killed Henri IV of France, who were the lovers of Marie de Medici,

e man who enters her circle seems to offer the chance of this. He has high ideals, or the pose of them. His silences seem suggestive of deep unutterable thoughts-though he may be thinking of nothing more important than a smudge on his white waistcoat-he has a tenderness in his gray (or black, or brown) eyes which is rather thrilling to a woman chilled by the lack-luster look of the man who is used to her presence and takes her for granted.... The Tired Business Man ought to be careful, lest he should become too tired to enter into the interests of his wife and to give her the minimum of comradeship which all women demand. The American Woman of Society, outside the Catholic Church, which still insists upon the old law, seems to me quicker than most others to cut her losses in the marriage gamble, if she finds, or thinks she finds, that she is losing too heavily for her peace of heart. Le

carried on his work, in spite of four children. They came first and her devotion to them was not altered, but that did not prevent her from attending to a growing list of patients at a time when influenza was raging in her district. She went about in a car which she drove herself, with the courage and cheerfulness of a gallant soldier. In her little battlefield there were many tragedies, because death took away the youngest-born or the eldest-born from many American homes, and her heart was often heavy; but she resisted all gloomy meditations and kept her nerve and her spirit by-singing. As she drove her car from the house of one patient to another she sang loudly to herself, over the wheel, any little old song that came into her head-"Hey-diddle-diddle

ght, humorous eyes, and an almost terrible truthfulness of speech. I was startled by some things she said about the war, and the psychology of men and women under the spell of war. They were true, but dangerous to speak aloud as this woman spoke them. Later, she talked of the heritage of hatred that had been bequeathed by war to the people of the world. "Let us kill hatred," she said. "It is the survival of the cave instinct in man which comes out of its hiding-places under the name of patriotism and justice." I do not know what link there was between this and some other thought which prompted her to show me photographs of two big, sturdy boys who, she told me, were her adopted children. It was a queer, touching story, about these children. "I adopted them not for their sake, but for mine," she said. She was a lonely woman, well married, with leisure and money, and the temptation o

ut I think that her frankness of speech to a stranger like myself, and her curious mixture of idealism and practicality, combined with a certain shrewdness of hu

in charity to public institutions and deserving cases, with a grim determination to unmask the professional beggar and the fraudulent society. She seemed to have a broad-hearted tolerance for the younger generation and a special affection for boys of all ages, whom she likes to feed up, and to keep amused by treating them to the circus or the "movies"; but I fancy that she is a stern disciplinarian with her family as well as her servants, and that her own relatives stand in awe of this masterful old lady who has a high sense of honor, and demands obedience, honesty, and service from those who look for her favors and her money. I detected a shrewd humor in her

eets and prim houses, reminiscent of Cheltenham and other English towns of ancient respectability and modern culture. After a lecture there many Bostonians came onto the platform, and I heard at once a difference in accent from the intonation of New York. It was a little more precise, with a careful avoidance of slang phrases. The people who spoke to me were earnest souls, with an idealism which seemed to lift them above the personal prejudices of party politics. I should imagine that some of

oms. The lady from New York looked amazed for a moment. Then she laughed, dropped her cigarette into her coffee-cup, and said: "Oh yes-I guess I forgot I was in Boston!" In that word Boston she expressed a world of propriety, conventional morality, and social austerity, a long, long way from the liberty of New York. I had been told that a Boston audience would be very cold and unenthusiastic, not because they would be out of sympathy with the lecturer, but because they were "very English" in their dislike

met on board ship and might, according to the chances of war, never meet again. Anyhow, she was restless, and desired work. She decided to study for the law examinations and to be called to the bar; and to keep her company, her mother, who was her best comrade, went into college with her, and shared her rooms. I like that idea of the mother and daughter reading and working together. It seems to me a good picture. In due time she was called to the bar, and entered the chambers where her father had worked, and did so well that a great lawyer who gave her his cases to prepare spoke rare words of praise about her. Then the war ended, one day, quite suddenly, the young English soldier arrived in Boston, and, after a few preliminary inquiries as to his chance of luck, said, "When shall we get married?" He was in a h

tsburgh by night, looking down on its blast-furnaces from a hill outside, appeared to me like a town behind the battle-lines under heavy gun-fire, and I am convinced that the workers in those factories are in the front-line trenches of life and deserve gold medals for their heroism. I had not been in the town ten minutes before a young lady with the poetical name of Pene

the League of Nations will be unnecessary for generations to come. I talked with these officers and found them just such earnest, serious scientific men as I had met in American Headquarters in France, where they were conducting war, not in our casual, breezy way, but as school-masters arranging a college demonstration, and overweighted by responsibility. It was in a room in the Capitol that I met one little lady with a complete geographical knowledge of the great halls and corridors of that splendid building, and an Irish way with her in her dealings with American Congressmen and Senators. Before the war I used to meet her in a little drawing-room not far away from Kensington Palace, London, and I imagined in my innocence that she was exclusively interested in literature and drama. But in one of the luncheon-rooms of the Capitol-where I lined up at the counter for a de

b called the Cliff-dwellers, where the chairman rapped for order on the table with a club that might have protected the home of Prehistoric Man, and addressed a gathering of good fellows who, as journalists, authors, painters, and musicians, are farthest removed from that simple child of nature who went out hunting for his dinner, and bashed his wife when she gnawed the meatiest bone. It was in the time of armistice, and these men were deeply anxious about the new problems which faced America and about the reshaping of the world's philosophy. They were generous and honest in their praise of England's mighty effort in the war, and they were enthusiastic to a man in the belief that an Anglo-American alliance was the best guaranty of the League of Nations, and the best hope for the safety of civilization. I came away with the belief that out of Chicago would come help fo

a little her immense and penetrating knowledge of human nature as it is found in "one-night stands," in the jungle of life behind the scenes, and in her own grim and gallant fight for fame. Fame had come to her suddenly and overwhelmingly, in Chicago, and New York was waiting for her. The pride of her achievement thrilled her to the finger-tips, and she was as happy as a little girl who has received her first doll as a birthday-present. She talked to me about her technic, about the way in which she had lived in her part before acting it, so that she felt hers

saw it crumbling away from them-and because (more alarming still) they heard from afar the first rumblings of a terrific storm between capital and labor. They spoke of these things frankly, with an evident sincerity and with a fine gravity-women as well as men, young girls as fearlessly and intelligently as bald-headed business men. Many of them deplored the late entry of the United States into the war, because they believed their people would have gained by longer sacrifice. With all their pride in the valor of their men, not one of them in my hearing used a braggart word, or claimed too great a share in the honor of victory. There was fear among them that their President was abandoning principles of vital import to their country, but no single man or woman I met spoke selfishly of America's commercial or political interest, and among all the people with whom I came in touch there was a deep sense of responsibility and a de