Tom came with us to the Stock Exchange.  We have to leave him at home when we go to the women’s lunches, but he spends the time with Valerie Latour, and in the late afternoons he goes to the Clubs with the husbands, and he says they are awfully good fellows and many brilliantly amusing, and full of common sense; but at some of the clubs they have not got any unwritten laws as to manners, so now and then when they get rather drunk, they are astonishingly rude to one another.  It is not considered a great disgrace for a young man to get tipsy here; the slang for it is to get “full.”  There are two grades, “fresh” and “full.”  When you are “fresh” you are just breezy and what we would call “above yourself;” but when you are “full,” you can’t speak plain, and are sometimes unsteady on your feet, so it is very unpleasant.  You can be “fresh,” too, without having drunk anything, if you have an uppish nature.  Octavia and I were perfectly astonished the first time we heard it spoken of.  A rather nice looking boy who was at dinner had apparently been “full” the night before, and the women on both sides of him chaffed him and scolded him as if it were a joke.  I am glad it is still considered a disgrace in England, because when it does occur it is kept out of sight.

After the Stock Exchange we went to see the workings of one of the great journals.  That was too wonderful, Mamma, everything happening in a vast room on one floor; compositing, typewriting, printing, and sorting.  It is astonishing the tremendous power of concentrating the will to be able to think in that flurry and noise;—­hundreds of clean-shaven young men in shirt-sleeves smoking cigars or cigarettes and doing their various duties.  The types interested us so; physiognomy counts for nothing, apparently,—­faces that might have been the first Napoleon or Tennyson or even Shakespeare,—­doing the simple manual part of lifting the blocks of metal and attending to the machinery, older men, these;—­and the Editor, who naturally must have been very clever, had a round moon face, tiny baby nose, two marbles stuffed in for eyes and the look of a boyish simpleton.

Tom was so enchanted because at the sporting editor’s desk there were a party of prize fighters, the “world’s light weight”—­whatever that means, a half “coloured gentleman,” that is what niggers are called—­with such white teeth and wiry and slight; and two large bull dogs of men who were heavyweights.  I felt obliged to ask them if they minded at all having their noses smashed in and black eyes, and if they felt nervous ever, and the little coloured gentleman grinned and said he only felt nervous over the money of the thing!  He was not anxious about the art or fame!  He just wanted to win.  Is not that an extraordinary point of view, Mamma—­To win?  It is the national motto, it seems; how, does not matter so much; and that is what makes them so splendidly successful, and that is what the other nations who play games with them don’t understand.  They, poor old-fashioned things, are taking an interest in the sport part, and so scattering their forces, while the Americans are concentrating on the winning.  And it is this quality which of course will make them the rulers of the world in time.