Osages City in an ordinary train and he had to dress her.  I am in the larger compartment with the two girls, and we have only one enormous bed for the three of us!  And it does seem quaint, Mamma, sleeping with women.  I felt quite shy at first; then we laughed so we could not get to sleep.  They are perfect angels and do everything for me, and make me so vain admiring my hair being so long and curly.  Columbia brushed it for half an hour last night, and we were just in the middle of it when we pulled up at a small station, on the beginning of the mining world, and to our surprise Mr. Renour and his friend got in.  We heard the noise and the greetings and all peeped out to see, and the Senator, sans gene, brought them down the passage to say how do you do.

Mr. Renour does look a pet!  He was (and still is to-day) in miner’s dress, and it is corduroy trousers tucked into high-laced boots and a grey flannel shirt with a shallow turn down collar which has been turned up again, looking like a Lord Palmerton, or someone of that date; a loose tie and a corduroy Norfolk jacket, all a sort of earth colour except the tie, which is blue.  The friend is the same, and they both have queer American-looking sort of sombrero greenish felt hats, and the friend hasn’t even a tie.

We were glad to see them, at least I was.  We were all in dressing-gowns, with our hair down, and the girls pretended to hide behind me and be coy, and we played the fool just like children.  It was fun, Mamma, and think of the faces of Harry’s two aunts, the Duchess and Lady Archibald, if they could have seen me being so undignified.  But here no one has any nasty thoughts, they are all happy and natural and innocent as kittens, and I am enjoying myself.

Gaston is frightfully jealous of the newcomers, but he is too much of a polished gentleman to be disagreeable over it; it is only the English who have remained savages in that respect, showing their tempers as plainly as a child would do.  If you remember, Harry had a thunderous face before we were married, whenever I teased him, and since, my heavens!  If people even look a good deal in a restaurant he is annoyed.  But I don’t mind so much, because my time has always been taken up with him making love to me himself.  It is the cold ones who are jealous just from vanity that are insupportable, as it is not that they love the woman so much themselves as because they think it is “dam cheek” (forgive me, Mamma) for any other man to dare to look at their belongings?  Now American men don’t seem jealous at all; they are so kind they are thinking of the woman’s pleasure, not their own.  Really, I am sure in the long run they must be far nicer to live with—­not a tenth part as vain as Englishmen.

The most jolly looking, jet-black old nigger in white duck livery brought us our coffee in the morning.  His face is a full moon of laughter.  No one could feel gloomy if he were near, and his voice, like a little child’s, is as sweet as a bird, and such delightful phrasing.  He has been with the Senator for fifteen years and couldn’t live “way from de car.”  His name is Marcus Aurelius, and I am sure he is just as great a philosopher as the Emperor was.