if it might be Albany or Detroit instead of Paris. By this time you're sitting in a chair drawn up to his desk and discussing the last Democratic victory. "How's Charlie Murphy standing now with the administration?" perhaps he asks, and then pretty soon, "But what can I do for you in Paris?"
And he does it. You don't have to call his secretary a week later to ask, How about that letter the embassy was going to give me? And the week after and the week after ring up some more to recall that there's an American running up an expense account at the hotel down the street. That's not Mr. Sharpe's way. Within ten minutes he had handed me a letter of introduction to M. Briand, Prime Minister of France. He laughed as he passed it to me. "Honestly, I'd hate to hand any one a gold brick," he said. "That document looks imposing enough and important enough that a limousine should be at your hotel entrance to take you to the front at 9 a. m. to-morrow. But nothing like that will happen. In France you have to remember that no one hurries. And an American can't."
You can hear that in every foreign language. It was a spectacled Herr Professor in Berlin who once said to me severely, "You Americans, this hurry it is your national vice." I feel that foreign governments have duly disciplined me in this direction during the past few months. So much of my job in serving the Pictorial Review in Europe seems to be to sit on a chair and wait in a War Office ante room. At the Maison de la Presse, 3 Rue François 1st, in
