I had had no business with them in Paris or in London on my previous visits.
In fact I had never been in any embassy except the British Embassy at Washington.

But the moment I entered that dark and dingy hall at 123, Victoria Street, between two cheap stores--the same entrance that the dwellers in the cheap flats above used--I knew that Uncle Sam had no fit dwelling there.

And the Ambassador's room greatly depressed me--dingy with twenty-nine years of dirt and darkness, and utterly undignified.
And the rooms for the secretaries and attaches were the little bedrooms, kitchen, etc., of that cheap flat; that's all it was.

For the place we paid $1,500 a year.

I did not understand then and I do not understand yet how Lowell, Bayard, Phelps, Hay, Choate, and Reid endured that cheap hole.