Page:The Plutocrat (1927).pdf/124

 Interesting'?" Ogle echoed. "I must say I think you take a gracious view of his impudence, Madame Momoro."

"Impudence? No, no!" She became serious again. "It was like a passage in Homer, or in some Gothic poem perhaps, where the great chieftains are introduced, one after the other, and the poet tells how mighty each one is and where his home-land is and how many followers he has. You don't see how precisely like that it is?"

He shook his head. "I fear you have learned to love satirizing Americans."

"But no! I am not satirizing. I truly think what I say."

He laughed, incredulous. "You won't judge the rest of us by such people, I hope; though foreigners are apt to get the impression we are all like that. One trouble with our country is that each generation produces a new brand of parvenu for the rest of us to live down. The foreigner sometimes mistakes the latest type of parvenu for our 'best people' and for typical; and so he draws the conclusion that we have no culture, no art, no literature. I admit that so far, in the European sense, we have nothing that may be called literature or architecture or music or painting