But empire-builders are not necessarily good mixers, The Englishwoman, although admitterly an excellent wife for an empire-builder or administrator, does not for that reason make a good wife for an ordinary foreigner. In the one case she is nearly always in an official position and called on to adopt a judicious mixture of tolerance and arrogance, In the other she is faced with the problem of changing her own mentality and her own habits in so far as they are not in harmony with those of the country of her adoption, "There is definitely something in us Englishwomen," says the Countess, hich is responsible for my own mother-in-law's injunction to my husband a propos of the question of marriage, She said, On no account bring me an English girl as daughter-in-law. You can bring me any kind of nationality or mixture of nationalities—except an English example of womanhood!"
Countess von Zeppelin is amusing on the subject of her own arrogance" about beds and open windows when she came as a bride to her new German home. "It was only when my husband refused to sleep in a bed tucked in the English way with blankets, instead of with sheets buttoned to an eiderdown in one piece as they are in Central Europe, that I gave up trying to instruct the housemaid and adapted myself with a bad grace! After several nights of finding myself without any coverings at all, I fod that I had come to like the other way better, The same with open windows. This, I know, is almost a moral question in England. Nevertheless I find that, since sleeping with shut windows, I am no longer plagued with colds and bronchitis to the same extent as before."
Another difficult difference for the Englishwoman to digest is that of education for her children, For while the American wife of a foreigner is content that her sons shall be brought up in the way of their father, an Englishwoman wants them sent to an English public school. Otherwise she is apt to feel that they can never be really "right." Often she imports English nurses and governnesses, not with the unassailably excellent idea of keeping up the language, but so that they should never lose sight of the fact that the are really Englishmen with a forei nome.
Countess von Zeppelin's has obviously been a happy on is able to laugh at herself now all the insularities of her beginning She sums up by saying that a SSU cessfúl international marriage may help much towards that friendship and understanding between natio which is so badly needed to-day, an that any woman who makes the venture with an-understanding hearg can achieve, apart from her happiness, something of real valu for the future family of nations.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.