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bathroom.
    “Because this is the day of the Classified Character,” Sarah said to the open door. She began to tidy the bedroom as she waited. “All heroines are slender; heroes are never bald; rich men are ruthless privateers or tolerable old fools; politicians are stupid or crooked; all children are cute; poor men are victims of other men; all Frenchwomen are chic; all Englishmen keep such stiff upper lips you can’t hear what they’re saying; all Italians are so human; all people in authority are petrified; all professors are dehydrated; all scientists are devoted to test-tubes. Do you want me to go on? I’ve a long list.”
    “What was that, Sarah? The water was running, and I couldn’t hear you, I’m sorry.” Mrs. Peel returned shivering from the bathroom, and began dressing with lightning speed. “I suppose they would have considered it a sign of weakness if I had lit a fire? Well, this is one morning when I won’t take very long to get ready.”
    Her voice became somewhat muffled as she struggled with a sweater. “You know, Sarah, most of the books we read abroad about America weren’t of much help to us. It wasn’t our fault entirely that we knew so little about our own country as it is today.” Then her voice became more normal again as she at last got her head through the sweater’s neckline without disarranging her hair too badly. “I mean, we learned a lot about some aspects of America, especially when they were squalid or harrowing. The realistic school of writing is so deceptive, implying the part is the whole.” She frowned thoughtfully as she fastened her skirt. “No wonder foreigners are baffled between one writer’s enthusiasms and another’s prejudices. You know, in these last few weeks as we travelled slowly across America, I’ve been amazed and excited. Now where are my shoes?” As she rummaged in her suitcase she went on, “And I’ve been learning all the time. There is so much more to America than ever gets into most novels about her. Why?” She was over at the dressing-table now, combing her hair into place. “Why don’t writers tell us about all kinds of things—the good and the bad and the middling? If they aren’t all described, then you get an overweighted picture. It is the completeness of writers like Dickens and Tolstoy that makes them live, isn’t it?”
    “The lady will now descend from her soap-box and advance into the unknown countryside on a voyage of discovery,” Sarah Bly suggested, opening the door.
    Mrs. Peel, collecting all the rest of her necessary equipment, followed her at last. She was still frowning, though. “I wonder if there are any travelling scholarships for writers—travelling in America, I mean?”
    “Give them a car, some money, and tell them to get lost, young man, get lost?”
    “Of course,” Mrs. Peel went on, following her own train of thought, “you can’t really blame the writers either. Before they have any financial success they just haven’t got any money to travel with, and so they write their autobiographies or they escape into history via the local library. And, once they have success, either they take up causes to justify the money they’ve made or they are kept much too busy.” She thought of all the literary parties and luncheons she had attended last winter.
    “Or perhaps they are just like us when we were young,” Sarah suggested. “When the word travel is mentioned they think of Paris.”
    Mrs. Peel said nothing more. She was thinking of the days when their little flat off the Rue de Seine had been the meeting-place of ambitious writers, with all their arguments, hopes, plans, and manuscripts. The days when... Would she ever be able to stop referring to them? The days now, she told herself firmly. But she couldn’t persuade herself to feel happy. Last winter she had attempted a little salon in New York, inviting those she had known abroad, along with the few American critics and writers she had met, to her