“Yes,” said the American lady.

The American lady did not hear.

“I suppose so,” said the American girl.

“There was a cat,” said the American girl.

“He loves the sun,” the American lady said.

“I don’t think so,” said the American lady.

The American lady looked and saw the last car.

“Is your husband American too?” asked the lady.

The American wife stood at the window looking out.

“I’ve always loved birds,” the American lady said.

“I bought him in Palermo,” the American lady said.

American men are the only men in the world to marry.

“It’s such a fine old hotel,” said the American lady.

The American lady’s bed was the one next to the window.

“I’m going down and get that kitty,” the American wife said.

“American men make the best husbands,” the American lady was saying.

“Americans make the best husbands,” the American lady said to my wife.

As the American girl passed the office, the padrone bowed from his desk.

The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building.

For several minutes I had not listened to the American lady, who was talking to my wife.

The American lady pulled the window-blind down and there was no more sea, even occasionally.

Someone, a very good friend, told me once, ‘No foreigner can make an American girl a good husband.’

Soon all the friends had gone off with a rich, young and unmarried American poet to a seaside resort near Trouville.

The American lady was a little deaf and she was afraid that perhaps signals of departure were given and that she did not hear them.

There was a blue light outside the compartment, and all night the train went very fast and the American lady lay awake and waited for a wreck.

In the night the American lady lay without sleeping because the train was a rapide and went very fast and she was afraid of the speed in the night.

The train stayed twenty-five minutes in the station at Marseilles and the American lady bought a copy of The Daily Mail and a half-bottle of Evian water.

You will enjoy these warm, homespun, American tales, bits of real life on the open ranch, in crowded tenement or comfortable home, and all with a healthy undercurrent of humor.

The American lady admired my wife’s travelling-coat, and it turned out that the American lady had bought her own clothes for twenty years now from the same maison de couturier in the Rue Saint Honoré.

I showed them the papers, which were written in very beautiful language and full of fratellanza and abnegazione, but which really said, with the adjectives removed, that I had been given the medals because I was an American.

I handed bags through the windows, and we were out on the dim longness of the platform, and the American lady put herself in charge of one of three men from Cook’s who said: “Just a moment, madame, and I’ll look for your name.”

The porter brought a truck and piled on the baggage, and my wife said goodbye and I said goodbye to the American lady, whose name had been found by the man from Cook’s on a typewritten page in a sheaf of typewritten pages which he replaced in his pocket.

In the morning the train was near Paris, and after the American lady had come out from the washroom, looking very wholesome and middle-aged and American in spite of not having slept, and had taken the cloth off the birdcage and hung the cage in the sun, she went back to the restaurant-car for breakfast.

Once there was an American woman sitting with her kid daughter at the next table to us and they were both eating ices and I kept looking at the girl and she was awfully good looking and I smiled at her and she smiled at me but that was all that ever came of it because I looked for her mother and her every day and I made up ways that I was going to speak to her and I wondered if I got to know her if her mother would let me take her out to Auteuil or Tremblay but I never saw either of them again.