By temperament I am afraid I am something of an extremist. My barely tolerant attitude toward my new country changed into a wholly reverential one. I desired to become an American myself, considering it a great honour, as in the olden days people came from all over the world to Greece, to become that country's citizens. I started my Americanism by adopting its brusqueness—it is an unfortunate fact that one is as likely to imitate the faults of those one admires as the virtues—but brusqueness which is so characteristic of America is mitigated by its young blood and by its buoyancy, and we of the old bloods can very little afford that trait. It must have made a poor combination in me, and many people must have found it hard to tolerate. The principal of the school told me, during my third year with her, that I had so completely changed in manners as to be hardly recognizable. When I first came to live with her, she said, I had had exquisite and charming manners; now, I had become as brusque as any raw western girl. She little understood that she was attacking my new garb of Americanism.
The school year began in October and ended in May, leaving me four months to my own devices. Two vacations I spent in a fashionable summer resort, not far from New York, where I not only had pupils enough to pay my expenses but ample time to read English and American
