right away. But I think long residence in England must have stamped out my natural affection for the human race. An Englishman doesn't like being caught on to right away. He thinks it bad form, and that anybody who is just eager to know him must be without friends himself, and that probably there is something real fishy about him. Nobody in England wants to know anybody else unless they can get something out of them. I don't mean necessarily anything tangible or pecuniary. But they want to know them so as to get a card for their parties, to get introductions through them to people more important still, to marry off their daughters to them, or to make a present to them of their younger sons. Dorothy is just like that. She won't look at anybody unless she thinks they are what she calls worth knowing. I suppose Dorothy is a snob, but at least she shares that appellation with nine-tenths of the other women in society, and a good half of the men.
So that's how it is that I'm impregnated with British aloofness, and have lost my native primitiveness that regarded my fellow men as brothers, and not merely as so many stepping-stones to my own advancement. I was summing-up my fellow-traveller and wondering if she was what Dorothy would call worth knowing. At first sight I didn't think she was. She was rather the kind of woman that I haven't much use for. Her hat came from Paris, there was no doubt about that. But her dress bore an unmistakably English look about it, and it was put on as only an Englishwoman does
