Stoddard could play the "swell" without being ridiculed, as he had sometimes been in San Francisco. In the streets the peddlers and shopkeepers called him "sir," and he loved it. At the same time, he willingly deferred to his ''betters" when he met them in London's drawing rooms. Attending George Eliot's reception or Lady Hardy's "Saturday Evenings" in St. John's Wood was instructive as well as fascinating. Stoddard quickly learned the nuances of class stratification and the degree of ingratiation proper to a Sir Thomas Hardy or to an Indian prince or to a poet like Phillip Marston. Nevertheless, the British, accustomed to such "Californians" as Joaquin Miller and Mark Twain, rather expected Stoddard to conform to the Wild-West stereotype, and they were no doubt disappointed when he so obviously did not. As he recalled:
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 | | We chat as well as an American is expected to do under the circumstances; we talk dirk and gulch and wild, wide West, because this is the sort of thing that we are bullied into by bevies of London maids who have never heard anything better of California. We grieve that we have never "dropped our man," for this is expected of us. We run out of bear stories and get bored with questions; and, in despair, turn the current of conversation back to the centre of civilization.
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During Stoddard's six-week engagement as Mark Twain's secretary-companion, the conversation ran to gossip and drollery. Stoddard's job consisted of little more than opening the mail and keeping a scrapbook of newspaper clippings. Afternoons were spent walking through the parks, and before dinner Twain would often play and sing spirituals at the piano, "rolling his vowels in the Italian style." After dinner they strolled to the Queen's Concert Rooms in Hanover Square, where Twain gave his lecture, "Roughing It on the Silver Frontier." Stoddard usually watched from the seclusion of the royal box. Afterward, accompanied by George Dolby, Twain's manager, they would pull up their easy chairs to the sitting room fireplace and smoke and drink and swap tales until well after midnight. During these boozy, mellow evenings, Twain talked so candidly about himself"his boyhood, his early struggles, his hopes, his aims"that Stoddard felt that he "could have written his biography at the end of the season"
(EE
65, 70).
3
As Twain recalled the same evenings, there had been no drinking to speak of, and Dolby's (but not his own) tales had been "indelicate" enough to "distress" Stoddard, "the pensive poet," who was "refined, sensitive,
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