Dear Kirry:—Here in Shanghar we are so beleaguered of nations that declare I have to refer to my passport constantly to remind myself that I'm an American citizen. For a time J. really felt like a proper Italian when all the gunboats were here and every other thing was a party on one of the ships or a dance in town enlivened by uniforms. made me feel so terribly ignorant not to know more than three and a half words of Italian and my High School French melted to nothingness og rapidly as an ice-cream cone on the Fourth of July.
Kitty, carissima (that's one word I did get to know, but don't pry into my language lessons), don't you think you could manage to have a Bill passed making the study of Esperanto obligatory in our schools? Think how it would help us out abroad, It's not 80 much that I want to be understood as that I want a language that no one else can understand You might think that my French pronunciation would ensure me that distinction, but every now and then I get my meaning across.
But as we were saying, foreigners are pleasantly different and I was all for going to Tive in an ancestral palace in Napoli or some such, but I wasn't urged overpoweringly. I might do it even yet, however, for judging from the little sailor boys I danced with one evening at a marvellously nice party, the whole nation is charmingly polite. After the boats sailed away we had an interval in which I took up with several other countries, but returned to my carlier attachments when Prince Aimene came to town. Of course he's only a_ second cousin of royalty, but that's closer than I ever thought I'd get in Lowa Venter, He was travelling "incognita," which means that everybody knew just who he was, but not being announced as such, they could treat him just like a regular fellow and not be bothered with so much ceremony, which seemed to suit all around. A girl who came} over on the boat with him said he; was the joy and delight of the Deck Sports Committee, because he was ready for anything, even to "Are you there, Bill?.'" Now don't go circulating it round the Business Girl's Club that I'm writing home bragging about getting chummy with Victor Emmanuel's second cousin because as a matter of fact I saw him exactly once, and then in a crowd. When I'ma_ nice (I shall be nice, Kitty) fat (I'm afraid I shall be fat) great-aunt I shall forget some of the harsh facts and make the eyes of my little grand-meees and nephews bulge with tales of celebrities I palled about with.
Some time back I was all for being a Russian. It hadn't appealed to me as so highly desirable until Pavlova came to town and then,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.