His Own People | Page 3

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Digitized for Project Gutenberg by Earle C. Beach
([email protected]) Italicized text is indicated by enclosure within
tildes ('~').

HIS OWN PEOPLE
by Booth Tarkington

I. A Change of Lodging
The glass-domed "palm-room" of the Grand Continental Hotel
Magnifique in Rome is of vasty heights and distances, filled with a
mellow green light which filters down languidly through the upper
foliage of tall palms, so that the two hundred people who may be
refreshing or displaying themselves there at the tea-hour have
something the look of under-water creatures playing upon the sea-bed.
They appear, however, to be unaware of their condition; even the ladies,
most like anemones of that gay assembly, do not seem to know it; and
when the Hungarian band (crustacean-like in costume, and therefore
well within the picture) has sheathed its flying tentacles and withdrawn
by dim processes, the tea-drinkers all float out through the doors,
instead of bubbling up and away through the filmy roof. In truth, some
such exit as that was imagined for them by a young man who remained
in the aquarium after they had all gone, late one afternoon of last winter.
They had been marvelous enough, and to him could have seemed little
more so had they made such a departure. He could almost have gone
that way himself, so charged was he with the uplift of his belief that, in
spite of the brilliant strangeness of the hour just past, he had been no
fish out of water.
While the waiters were clearing the little tables, he leaned back in his
chair in a content so rich it was nearer ecstasy. He could not bear to
disturb the possession joy had taken of him, and, like a half-awake boy
clinging to a dream that his hitherto unkind sweetheart has kissed him,
lingered on in the enchanted atmosphere, his eyes still full of all they
had beheld with such delight, detaining and smiling upon each
revelation of this fresh memory—-the flashingly lovely faces, the
dreamily lovely faces, the pearls and laces of the anemone ladies, the
color and romantic fashion of the uniforms, and the old princes who
had been pointed out to him: splendid old men wearing white

mustaches and single eye-glasses, as he had so long hoped and dreamed
they did.
"Mine own people!" he whispered. "I have come unto mine own at last.
Mine own people!" After long waiting (he told himself), he had seen
them--the people he had wanted to see, wanted to know, wanted to be
~of!~ Ever since he had begun to read of the "beau monde" in his
schooldays, he had yearned to know some such sumptuous reality as
that which had come true to-day, when, at last, in Rome he had seen
--as he wrote home that night--"the finest essence of Old-World society
mingling in Cosmopolis."
Artificial odors (too heavy to keep up with the crowd that