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Through the Eye of the Needle: A Romance

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Title: Through the Eye of the Needle: A Romance

Author: William Dean Howells


        
Release date: June 1, 2005 [eBook #8295]
                Most recently updated: February 25, 2018

Language: English

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THROUGH THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE

A Romance

With An Introduction


By William Dean Howells


1907




INTRODUCTION


Aristides Homos, an Emissary of the Altrurian Commonwealth, visited the
United States during the summer of 1893 and the fall and winter
following. For some weeks or months he was the guest of a well-known
man of letters at a hotel in one of our mountain resorts; in the early
autumn he spent several days at the great Columbian Exhibition in
Chicago; and later he came to New York, where he remained until he
sailed, rather suddenly, for Altruria, taking the circuitous route by
which he came. He seems to have written pretty constantly throughout his
sojourn with us to an intimate friend in his own country, giving freely
his impressions of our civilization. His letters from New York appear to
have been especially full, and, in offering the present synopsis of these
to the American reader, it will not be impertinent to note certain
peculiarities of the Altrurian attitude which the temperament of the
writer has somewhat modified. He is entangled in his social sophistries
regarding all the competitive civilizations; he cannot apparently do full
justice to the superior heroism of charity and self-sacrifice as
practised in countries where people live _upon_ each other as the
Americans do, instead of _for_ each other as the Altrurians do; but
he has some glimmerings of the beauty of our living, and he has
undoubtedly the wish to be fair to our ideals. He is unable to value our
devotion to the spirit of Christianity amid the practices which seem to
deny it; but he evidently wishes to recognize the possibility of such a
thing. He at least accords us the virtues of our defects, and, among
the many visitors who have censured us, he has not seen us with his
censures prepared to fit the instances; in fact, the very reverse has
been his method.

Many of the instances which he fits with his censures are such as he
could no longer note, if he came among us again. That habit of
celebrating the munificence of the charitable rich, on which he spends
his sarcasm, has fallen from us through the mere superabundance of
occasion. Our rich people give so continuously for all manner of good
objects that it would be impossible for our press, however vigilant, to
note the successive benefactions, and millions are now daily bestowed
upon needy educational institutions, of which no mention whatever is made
in the newspapers. If a millionaire is now and then surprised in a good
action by a reporter of uncommon diligence, he is able by an appeal to
their common humanity to prevail with the witness to spare him the
revolting publicity which it must be confessed would once have followed
his discovery; the right hand which is full to overflowing is now as
skilled as the empty right hand in keeping the left hand ignorant of its
doings. This has happened through the general decay of snobbishness among
us, perhaps. It is certain that there is no longer the passion for a
knowledge of the rich, and the smart, which made us ridiculous to Mr.
Homos. Ten or twelve years ago, our newspapers abounded in intelligence
of the coming and going of social leaders, of their dinners and lunches
and teas, of their receptions and balls, and the guests who were bidden
to them. But this sort of unwholesome and exciting gossip, which was
formerly devoured by their readers with inappeasable voracity, is no
longer supplied, simply because the taste for it has wholly passed away.

Much the same might be said of the social hospitalities which raised our
visitor's surprise. For example, many people are now asked to dinner who
really need a dinner, and not merely those who revolt from the notion of
dinner with loathing, and go to it with abhorrence. At the tables of our
highest social leaders one now meets on a perfect equality persons of
interesting minds and uncommon gifts who would once have been excluded
because they were hungry, or were not in the hostess's set, or had not a
new gown or a dress-suit. This contributes greatly to the pleasure of the
time, and promotes the increasing kindliness between the rich and poor
for which our status is above all things notable.

The accusation which our critic brings that the American spirit has been
almost Europeanized away, in its social forms, would be less grounded in
the observance of a later visitor. The customs of good society must be
the same everywhere in some measure, but the student of the competitive
world would now find European hospitality Americanized, rather than
American hospitality Europeanized. The careful research which has been
made into our social origins has resulted in bringing back many of the
aboriginal usages; and, with the return of the old American spirit of
fraternity, many of the earlier dishes as well as amenities have been
restored. A Thanksgiving dinner in the year 1906 would have been found
more like a Thanksgiving dinner in 1806 than the dinner to which Mr.
Homos was asked in 1893, and which he has studied so interestingly,
though not quite without some faults of taste and discretion. The
prodigious change for the better in some material aspects of our status
which has taken place in the last twelve years could nowhere be so well
noted as in the picture he gives us of the housing of our people in 1893.
His study of the evolution of the apartment-house from the old
flat-house, and the still older single dwelling, is very curious, and,
upon the whole, not incorrect. But neither of these last differed so
much from the first as the apartment-house now differs from the
apartment-house of his day. There are now no dark rooms opening on
airless pits for the family, or black closets and dismal basements for
the servants. Every room has abundant light and perfect ventilation, and
as nearly a southern exposure as possible. The appointments of the houses
are no longer in the spirit of profuse and vulgar luxury which it must be
allowed once characterized them. They are simply but tastefully finished,
they are absolutely fireproof, and, with their less expensive decoration,
the rents have been so far lowered that in any good position a quarter of
nine or ten rooms, with as many baths, can be had for from three thousand
to fifteen thousand dollars. This fact alone must attract to our
metropolis the best of our population, the bone and sinew which have no
longer any use for themselves where they have been expended in rearing
colossal fortunes, and now demand a metropolitan repose.

The apartments are much better fitted for a family of generous size than
those which Mr. Homos observed. Children, who were once almost unheard
of, and quite unheard, in apartment-houses, increasingly abound under
favor of the gospel of race preservation. The elevators are full of them,
and in the grassy courts round which the houses are built, the little
ones play all day long, or paddle in the fountains, warmed with
steam-pipes in the winter, and cooled to an agreeable temperature in a
summer which has almost lost its terrors for the stay-at-home New-Yorker.
Each child has his or her little plot of ground in the roof-garden, where
they are taught the once wellnigh forgotten art of agriculture.

The improvement of the tenement-house has gone hand in hand with that of
the apartment-house. As nearly as the rate of interest on the landlord's
investment will allow, the housing of the poor approaches in comfort that
of the rich. Their children are still more numerous, and the playgrounds
supplied them in every open space and on every pier are visited
constantly by the better-to-do children, who exchange with them lessons
of form and fashion for the scarcely less valuable instruction in
practical life which the poorer little ones are able to give. The rents
in the tenement houses are reduced even more notably than those in the
apartment-houses, so that now, with the constant increase in wages, the
tenants are able to pay their rents promptly. The evictions once so
common are very rare; it is doubtful whether a nightly or daily walk in
the poorer quarters of the town would develop, in the coldest weather,
half a dozen cases of families set out on the sidewalk with their
household goods about them.

The Altrurian Emissary visited this country when it was on the verge of
the period of great economic depression extending from 1894 to 1898, but,
after the Spanish War, Providence marked the divine approval of our
victory in that contest by renewing in unexampled measure the prosperity
of the Republic. With the downfall of the trusts, and the release of our
industrial and commercial forces to unrestricted activity, the condition
of every form of labor has been immeasurably improved, and it is now
united with capital in bonds of the closest affection. But in no phase
has its fate been so brightened as in that of domestic service. This has
occurred not merely through the rise of wages, but through a greater
knowledge between the employing and employed. When, a few years since, it
became practically impossible for mothers of families to get help from
the intelligence-offices, and ladies were obliged through lack of cooks
and chambermaids to do the work of the kitchen and the chamber and
parlor, they learned to realize what such work was, how poorly paid, how
badly lodged, how meanly fed. From this practical knowledge it was
impossible for them to retreat to their old supremacy and indifference as
mistresses. The servant problem was solved, once for all, by humanity,
and it is doubtful whether, if Mr. Homos returned to us now, he would
give offence by preaching the example of the Altrurian ladies, or would
be shocked by the contempt and ignorance of American women where other
women who did their household drudgery were concerned.

As women from having no help have learned how to use their helpers,
certain other hardships have been the means of good. The flattened wheel
of the trolley, banging the track day and night, and tormenting the
waking and sleeping ear, was, oddly enough, the inspiration of reforms
which have made our city the quietest in the world. The trolleys now pass
unheard; the elevated train glides by overhead with only a modulated
murmur; the subway is a retreat fit for meditation and prayer, where the
passenger can possess his soul in a peace to be found nowhere else; the
automobile, which was unknown in the day of the Altrurian Emissary, whirs
softly through the most crowded thoroughfare, far below the speed limit,
with a sigh of gentle satisfaction in its own harmlessness, and, “like
the sweet South, taking and giving odor.” The streets that he saw so
filthy and unkempt in 1893 are now at least as clean as they are quiet.
Asphalt has universally replaced the cobble-stones and Belgian blocks of
his day, and, though it is everywhere full of holes, it is still asphalt,
and may some time be put in repair.

There is a note of exaggeration in his characterization of our men which
the reader must regret. They are not now the intellectual inferior of our
women, or at least not so much the inferiors. Since his day they have
made a vast advance in the knowledge and love of literature. With the
multitude of our periodicals, and the swarm of our fictions selling from
a hundred thousand to half a million each, even our business-men cannot
wholly escape culture, and they have become more and more cultured, so
that now you frequently hear them asking what this or that book is all
about. With the mention of them, the reader will naturally recur to the
work of their useful and devoted lives--the accumulation of money. It is
this accumulation, this heaping-up of riches, which the Altrurian
Emissary accuses in the love-story closing his study of our conditions,
but which he might not now so totally condemn.

As we have intimated, he has more than once guarded against a rash
conclusion, to which the logical habit of the Altrurian mind might have
betrayed him. If he could revisit us we are sure that he would have still
greater reason to congratulate himself on his forbearance, and would
doubtless profit by the lesson which events must teach all but the most
hopeless doctrinaires. The evil of even a small war (and soldiers
themselves do not deny that wars, large or small, are evil) has, as we
have noted, been overruled for good in the sort of Golden Age, or Age on
a Gold Basis, which we have long been enjoying. If our good-fortune
should be continued to us in reward of our public and private virtue,
the fact would suggest to so candid an observer that in economics, as in
other things, the rule proves the exception, and that as good times have
hitherto always been succeeded by bad times, it stands to reason that
our present period of prosperity will never be followed by a period of
adversity.

It would seem from the story continued by another hand in the second part
of this work, that Altruria itself is not absolutely logical in its
events, which are subject to some of the anomalies governing in our own
affairs. A people living in conditions which some of our dreamers would
consider ideal, are forced to discourage foreign emigration, against
their rule of universal hospitality, and in at least one notable instance
are obliged to protect themselves against what they believe an evil
example by using compulsion with the wrongdoers, though the theory of
their life is entirely opposed to anything of the kind. Perhaps, however,
we are not to trust to this other hand at all times, since it is a
woman's hand, and is not to be credited with the firm and unerring touch
of a man's. The story, as she completes it, is the story of the
Altrurian's love for an American woman, and will be primarily interesting
for that reason. Like the Altrurian's narrative, it is here compiled from
a succession of letters, which in her case were written to a friend in
America, as his were written to a friend in Altruria. But it can by no
means have the sociological value which the record of his observations
among ourselves will have for the thoughtful reader. It is at best the
record of desultory and imperfect glimpses of a civilization
fundamentally alien to her own, such as would attract an enthusiastic
nature, but would leave it finally in a sort of misgiving as to the
reality of the things seen and heard. Some such misgiving attended the
inquiries of those who met the Altrurian during his sojourn with us, but
it is a pity that a more absolute conclusion should not have been the
effect of this lively lady's knowledge of the ideal country of her
adoption. It is, however, an interesting psychological result, and it
continues the tradition of all the observers of ideal conditions from Sir
Thomas More down to William Morris. Either we have no terms for
conditions so unlike our own that they cannot be reported to us with
absolute intelligence, or else there is in every experience of them an
essential vagueness and uncertainty.




PART FIRST



THROUGH THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE




I


If I spoke with Altrurian breadth of the way New-Yorkers live, my dear
Cyril, I should begin by saying that the New-Yorkers did not live at all.
But outside of our happy country one learns to distinguish, and to allow
that there are several degrees of living, all indeed hateful to us, if we
knew them, and yet none without some saving grace in it. You would say
that in conditions where men were embattled against one another by the
greed and the envy and the ambition which these conditions perpetually
appeal to here, there could be no grace in life; but we must remember
that men have always been better than their conditions, and that
otherwise they would have remained savages without the instinct or the
wish to advance. Indeed, our own state is testimony of a potential
civility in all states, which we must keep in mind when we judge the
peoples of the plutocratic world, and especially the American people, who
are above all others the devotees and exemplars of the plutocratic ideal,
without limitation by any aristocracy, theocracy, or monarchy. They are
purely commercial, and the thing that cannot be bought and sold has
logically no place in their life. But life is not logical outside of
Altruria; we are the only people in the world, my dear Cyril, who are
privileged to live reasonably; and again I say we must put by our own
criterions if we wish to understand the Americans, or to recognize that
measure of loveliness which their warped and stunted and perverted lives
certainly show, in spite of theory and in spite of conscience, even. I
can make this clear to you, I think, by a single instance, say that of
the American who sees a case of distress, and longs to relieve it. If he
is rich, he can give relief with a good conscience, except for the harm
that may come to his beneficiary from being helped; but if he is not
rich, or not finally rich, and especially if he has a family dependent
upon him, he cannot give in anything like the measure Christ bade us give
without wronging those dear to him, immediately or remotely. That is to
say, in conditions which oblige every man to look out for himself, a man
cannot be a Christian without remorse; he cannot do a generous action
without self-reproach; he cannot be nobly unselfish without the fear of
being a fool. You would think that this predicament must deprave, and so
without doubt it does; and yet it is not wholly depraving. It often has
its effect in character of a rare and pathetic sublimity; and many
Americans take all the cruel risks of doing good, reckless of the evil
that may befall them, and defiant of the upbraidings of their own hearts.
This is something that we Altrurians can scarcely understand: it is like
the munificence of a savage who has killed a deer and shares it with his
starving tribesmen, forgetful of the hungering little ones who wait his
return from the chase with food; for life in plutocratic countries is
still a chase, and the game is wary and sparse, as the terrible average
of failures witnesses.

Of course, I do not mean that Americans may not give at all without
sensible risk, or that giving among them is always followed by a logical
regret; but, as I said, life with them is in no wise logical. They even
applaud one another for their charities, which they measure by the amount
given, rather than by the love that goes with the giving. The widow's
mite has little credit with them, but the rich man's million has an
acclaim that reverberates through their newspapers long after his gift is
made. It is only the poor in America who do charity as we do, by giving
help where it is needed; the Americans are mostly too busy, if they are
at all prosperous, to give anything but money; and the more money they
give, the more charitable they esteem themselves. From time to time some
man with twenty or thirty millions gives one of them away, usually to a
public institution of some sort, where it will have no effect with the
people who are underpaid for their work or cannot get work; and then his
deed is famed throughout the continent as a thing really beyond praise.
Yet any one who thinks about it must know that he never earned the
millions he kept, or the millions he gave, but somehow made them from the
labor of others; that, with all the wealth left him, he cannot miss the
fortune he lavishes, any more than if the check which conveyed it were a
withered leaf, and not in any wise so much as an ordinary working-man
might feel the bestowal of a postage-stamp.

But in this study of the plutocratic mind, always so fascinating to me, I
am getting altogether away from what I meant to tell you. I meant to tell
you not how Americans live in the spirit, illogically, blindly, and
blunderingly, but how they live in the body, and more especially how they
house themselves in this city of New York. A great many of them do not
house themselves at all, but that is a class which we cannot now
consider, and I will speak only of those who have some sort of a roof
over their heads.




II


Formerly the New-Yorker lived in one of three different ways: in private
houses, or boarding-houses, or hotels; there were few restaurants or
public tables outside of the hotels, and those who had lodgings and took
their meals at eating-houses were but a small proportion of the whole
number. The old classification still holds in a measure, but within the
last thirty years, or ever since the Civil War, when the enormous
commercial expansion of the country began, several different ways of
living have been opened. The first and most noticeable of these is
housekeeping in flats, or apartments of three or four rooms or more, on
the same floor, as in all the countries of Europe except England; though
the flat is now making itself known in London, too. Before the war, the
New-Yorker who kept house did so in a separate house, three or four
stories in height, with a street door of its own. Its pattern within was
fixed by long usage, and seldom varied; without, it was of brown-stone
before, and brick behind, with an open space there for drying clothes,
which was sometimes gardened or planted with trees and vines. The rear of
the city blocks which these houses formed was more attractive than the
front, as you may still see in the vast succession of monotonous
cross-streets not yet invaded by poverty or business; and often the
perspective of these rears is picturesque and pleasing. But with the
sudden growth of the population when peace came, and through the
acquaintance the hordes of American tourists had made with European
fashions of living, it became easy, or at least simple, to divide the
floors of many of these private dwellings into apartments, each with its
own kitchen and all the apparatus of housekeeping. The apartments then
had the street entrance and the stairways in common, and they had in
common the cellar and the furnace for heating; they had in common the
disadvantage of being badly aired and badly lighted. They were dark,
cramped, and uncomfortable, but they were cheaper than separate houses,
and they were more homelike than boarding-houses or hotels. Large numbers
of them still remain in use, and when people began to live in flats, in
conformity with the law of evolution, many buildings were put up and
subdivided into apartments in imitation of the old dwellings which had
been changed.

But the apartment as the New-Yorkers now mostly have it, was at the same
time evolving from another direction. The poorer class of New York
work-people had for a long period before the war lived, as they still
live, in vast edifices, once thought prodigiously tall, which were called
tenement-houses. In these a family of five or ten persons is commonly
packed in two or three rooms, and even in one room, where they eat and
sleep, without the amenities and often without the decencies of life, and
of course without light and air. The buildings in case of fire are
death-traps; but the law obliges the owners to provide some apparent
means of escape, which they do in the form of iron balconies and ladders,
giving that festive air to their façades which I have already noted. The
bare and dirty entries and staircases are really ramifications of the
filthy streets without, and each tenement opens upon a landing as if it
opened upon a public thoroughfare. The rents extorted from the inmates is
sometimes a hundred per cent., and is nearly always cruelly out of
proportion to the value of the houses, not to speak of the wretched
shelter afforded; and when the rent is not paid the family in arrears is
set with all its poor household gear upon the sidewalk, in a pitiless
indifference to the season and the weather, which you could not realize
without seeing it, and which is incredible even of plutocratic nature. Of
course, landlordism, which you have read so much of, is at its worst
in the case of the tenement-houses. But you must understand that
comparatively few people in New York own the roofs that shelter them. By
far the greater number live, however they live, in houses owned by
others, by a class who prosper and grow rich, or richer, simply by owning
the roofs over other men's heads. The landlords have, of course, no human
relation with their tenants, and really no business relations, for all
the affairs between them are transacted by agents. Some have the
reputation of being better than others; but they all live, or expect to
live, without work, on their rents. They are very much respected for it;
the rents are considered a just return from the money invested. You must
try to conceive of this as an actual fact, and not merely as a
statistical statement. I know it will not be easy for you; it is not easy
for me, though I have it constantly before my face.




III


The tenement-house, such as it is, is the original of the
apartment-house, which perpetuates some of its most characteristic
features on a scale and in material undreamed of in the simple philosophy
of the inventor of the tenement-house. The worst of these features is
the want of light and air, but as much more space and as many more rooms
are conceded as the tenant will pay for. The apartment-house, however,
soars to heights that the tenement-house never half reached, and is
sometimes ten stories high. It is built fireproof, very often, and is
generally equipped with an elevator, which runs night and day, and makes
one level of all the floors. The cheaper sort, or those which have
departed less from the tenement-house original, have no elevators, but
the street door in all is kept shut and locked, and is opened only by the
tenant's latch-key or by the janitor having charge of the whole building.
In the finer houses there is a page whose sole duty it is to open and
shut this door, and who is usually brass-buttoned to one blinding effect
of livery with the elevator-boy. Where this page or hall-boy is found,
the elevator carries you to the door of any apartment you seek; where he
is not found, there is a bell and a speaking-tube in the lower entry, for
each apartment, and you ring up the occupant and talk to him as many
stories off as he happens to be. But people who can afford to indulge
their pride will not live in this sort of apartment-house, and the
rents in them are much lower than in the finer sort. The finer sort are
vulgarly fine for the most part, with a gaudy splendor of mosaic
pavement, marble stairs, frescoed ceilings, painted walls, and cabinet
wood-work. But there are many that are fine in a good taste, in the
things that are common to the inmates. Their fittings for housekeeping
are of all degrees of perfection, and, except for the want of light and
air, life in them has a high degree of gross luxury. They are heated
throughout with pipes of steam or hot water, and they are sometimes
lighted with both gas and electricity, which the inmate uses at will,
though of course at his own cost. Outside, they are the despair of
architecture, for no style has yet been invented which enables the artist
to characterize them with beauty, and wherever they lift their vast bulks
they deform the whole neighborhood, throwing the other buildings out of
scale, and making it impossible for future edifices to assimilate
themselves to the intruder.

There is no end to the apartment-houses for multitude, and there is no
street or avenue free from them. Of course, the better sort are to be
found on the fashionable avenues and the finer cross-streets, but others
follow the course of the horse-car lines on the eastern and western
avenues, and the elevated roads on the avenues which these have invaded.
In such places they are shops below and apartments above, and I cannot
see that the inmates seem at all sensible that they are unfitly housed in
them. People are born and married, and live and die in the midst of an
uproar so frantic that you would think they would go mad of it; and I
believe the physicians really attribute something of the growing
prevalence of neurotic disorders to the wear and tear of the nerves from
the rush of the trains passing almost momently, and the perpetual jarring
of the earth and air from their swift transit. I once spent an evening in
one of these apartments, which a friend had taken for a few weeks last
spring (you can get them out of season for any length of time), and as
the weather had begun to be warm, we had the windows open, and so we had
the full effect of the railroad operated under them. My friend had become
accustomed to it, but for me it was an affliction which I cannot give you
any notion of. The trains seemed to be in the room with us, and I sat as
if I had a locomotive in my lap. Their shrieks and groans burst every
sentence I began, and if I had not been master of that visible speech
which we use so much at home I never should have known what my friend was
saying. I cannot tell you how this brutal clamor insulted me, and made
the mere exchange of thought a part of the squalid struggle which is the
plutocratic conception of life; I came away after a few hours of it,
bewildered and bruised, as if I had been beaten upon with hammers.

Some of the apartments on the elevated lines are very good, as such
things go; they are certainly costly enough to be good; and they are
inhabited by people who can afford to leave them during the hot season
when the noise is at its worst; but most of them belong to people who
must dwell in them summer and winter, for want of money and leisure to
get out of them, and who must suffer incessantly from the noise I could
not endure for a few hours. In health it is bad enough, but in sickness
it must be horrible beyond all parallel. Imagine a mother with a dying
child in such a place; or a wife bending over the pillow of her husband
to catch the last faint whisper of farewell, as a train of five or six
cars goes roaring by the open window! What horror! What profanation!




IV


The noise is bad everywhere in New York, but in some of the finer
apartment-houses on the better streets you are as well out of it as you
can be anywhere in the city. I have been a guest in these at different
times, and in one of them I am such a frequent guest that I may be said
to know its life intimately. In fact, my hostess (women transact society
so exclusively in America that you seldom think of your host) in the
apartment I mean to speak of, invited me to explore it one night when I
dined with her, so that I might, as she said, tell my friends when I got
back to Altruria how people lived in America; and I cannot feel that I
am violating her hospitality in telling you now. She is that Mrs. Makely
whom I met last summer in the mountains, and whom you thought so strange
a type from the account of her I gave you, but who is not altogether
uncommon here. I confess that, with all her faults, I like her, and I
like to go to her house. She is, in fact, a very good woman, perfectly
selfish by tradition, as the American women must be, and wildly generous
by nature, as they nearly always are; and infinitely superior to her
husband in cultivation, as is commonly the case with them. As he knows
nothing but business, he thinks it is the only thing worth knowing, and
he looks down on the tastes and interests of her more intellectual life
with amiable contempt, as something almost comic. She respects business,
too, and so she does not despise his ignorance as you would suppose; it
is at least the ignorance of a business-man, who must have something in
him beyond her ken, or else he would not be able to make money as he
does.

With your greater sense of humor, I think you would be amused if you
could see his smile of placid self-satisfaction as he listens to our
discussion of questions and problems which no more enter his daily life
than they enter the daily life of an Eskimo; but I do not find it
altogether amusing myself, and I could not well forgive it, if I did not
know that he was at heart so simple and good, in spite of his
commerciality. But he is sweet and kind, as the American men so often
are, and he thinks his wife is the delightfulest creature in the world,
as the American husband nearly always does. They have several times asked
me to dine with them _en famille;_ and, as a matter of form, he
keeps me a little while with him after dinner, when she has left the
table, and smokes his cigar, after wondering why we do not smoke in
Altruria; but I can see that he is impatient to get to her in their
drawing-room, where we find her reading a book in the crimson light of
the canopied lamp, and where he presently falls silent, perfectly happy
to be near her. The drawing-room is of a good size itself, and it has a
room opening out of it called the library, with a case of books in it,
and Mrs. Makely's piano-forte. The place is rather too richly and densely
rugged, and there is rather more curtaining and shading of the windows
than we should like; but Mrs. Makely is too well up-to-date, as she would
say, to have much of the bric-à-brac about which she tells me used to
clutter people's houses here. There are some pretty good pictures on the
walls, and a few vases and bronzes, and she says she has produced a
greater effect of space by quelling the furniture--she means, having few
pieces and having them as small as possible. There is a little stand with
her afternoon tea-set in one corner, and there is a pretty writing-desk
in the library; I remember a sofa and some easy-chairs, but not too
many of them. She has a table near one of the windows, with books and
papers on it. She tells me that she sees herself that the place is kept
just as she wishes it, for she has rather a passion for neatness,
and you never can trust servants not to stand the books on their heads or
study a vulgar symmetry in the arrangements. She never allows them in
there, she says, except when they are at work under her eye; and she
never allows anybody there except her guests, and her husband after he
has smoked. Of course, her dog must be there; and one evening after her
husband fell asleep in the arm-chair near her, the dog fell asleep on
the fleece at her feet, and we heard them softly breathing in unison.
She made a pretty little mocking mouth when the sound first became
audible, and said that she ought really to have sent Mr. Makely out with
the dog, for the dog ought to have the air every day, and she had
been kept indoors; but sometimes Mr. Makely came home from business so
tired that she hated to send him out, even for the dog's sake, though he
was so apt to become dyspeptic. “They won't let you have dogs in some of
the apartment-houses, but I tore up the first lease that had that clause
in it, and I told Mr. Makely that I would rather live in a house all my
days than any flat where my dog wasn't as welcome as I was. Of course,
they're rather troublesome.”

The Makelys had no children, but it is seldom that the occupants of
apartment-houses of a good class have children, though there is no clause
in the lease against them. I verified this fact from Mrs. Makely herself,
by actual inquiry, for in all the times that I had gone up and down in
the elevator to her apartment I had never seen any children. She seemed
at first to think I was joking, and not to like it, but when she found
that I was in earnest she said that she did not suppose all the families
living under that roof had more than four or five children among them.
She said that it would be inconvenient; and I could not allege the
tenement-houses in the poor quarters of the city, where children seemed
to swarm, for it is but too probable that they do not regard convenience
in such places, and that neither parents nor children are more
comfortable for their presence.




V


Comfort is the American ideal, in a certain way, and comfort is certainly
what is studied in such an apartment as the Makelys inhabit. We got to
talking about it, and the ease of life in such conditions, and it was
then she made me that offer to show me her flat, and let me report to the
Altrurians concerning it. She is all impulse, and she asked, How would I
like to see it _now?_ and when I said I should be delighted, she
spoke to her husband, and told him that she was going to show me through
the flat. He roused himself promptly, and went before us, at her bidding,
to turn up the electrics in the passages and rooms, and then she led the
way out through the dining-room.

“This and the parlors count three, and the kitchen here is the fourth
room of the eight,” she said, and as she spoke she pushed open the door
of a small room, blazing with light and dense with the fumes of the
dinner and the dish-washing which was now going on in a closet opening
out of the kitchen.

She showed me the set range, at one side, and the refrigerator in an
alcove, which she said went with the flat, and, “Lena,” she said to the
cook, “this is the Altrurian gentleman I was telling you about, and I
want him to see your kitchen. Can I take him into your room?”

The cook said, “Oh yes, ma'am,” and she gave me a good stare, while Mrs.
Makely went to the kitchen window and made me observe that it let in the
outside air, though the court that it opened into was so dark that one
had to keep the electrics going in the kitchen night and day. “Of course,
it's an expense,” she said, as she closed the kitchen door after us. She
added, in a low, rapid tone, “You must excuse my introducing the cook.
She has read all about you in the papers--you didn't know, I suppose,
that there were reporters that day of your delightful talk in the
mountains, but I had them--and she was wild, when she heard you were
coming, and made me promise to let her have a sight of you somehow. She
says she wants to go and live in Altruria, and if you would like to take
home a cook, or a servant of any kind, you wouldn't have much trouble.
Now here,” she ran on, without a moment's pause, while she flung open
another door, “is what you won't find in every apartment-house, even very
good ones, and that's a back elevator. Sometimes there are only stairs,
and they make the poor things climb the whole way up from the basement,
when they come in, and all your marketing has to be brought up that way,
too; sometimes they send it up on a kind of dumb-waiter, in the cheap
places, and you give your orders to the market-men down below through a
speaking-tube. But here we have none of that bother, and this elevator is
for the kitchen and housekeeping part of the flat. The grocer's and the
butcher's man, and anybody who has packages for you, or trunks, or that
sort of thing, use it, and, of course, it's for the servants, and they
appreciate not having to walk up as much as anybody.”

“Oh yes,” I said, and she shut the elevator door and opened another a
little beyond it.

“This is our guest chamber,” she continued, as she ushered me into a very
pretty room, charmingly furnished. “It isn't very light by day, for it
opens on a court, like the kitchen and the servants' room here,” and with
that she whipped out of the guest chamber and into another doorway across
the corridor. This room was very much narrower, but there were two small
beds in it, very neat and clean, with some furnishings that were in
keeping, and a good carpet under foot. Mrs. Makely was clearly proud of
it, and expected me to applaud it; but I waited for her to speak, which
upon the whole she probably liked as well.

“I only keep two servants, because in a flat there isn't really room for
more, and I put out the wash and get in cleaning-women when it's needed.
I like to use my servants well, because it pays, and I hate to see
anybody imposed upon. Some people put in a double-decker, as they call
it--a bedstead with two tiers, like the berths on a ship; but I think
that's a shame, and I give them two regular beds, even if it does crowd
them a little more and the beds have to be rather narrow. This room has
outside air, from the court, and, though it's always dark, it's very
pleasant, as you see.” I did not say that I did not see, and this
sufficed Mrs. Makely.

“Now,” she said, “I'll show you _our_ rooms,” and she flew down the
corridor towards two doors that stood open side by side and flashed into
them before me. Her husband was already in the first she entered, smiling
in supreme content with his wife, his belongings, and himself.

“This is a southern exposure, and it has a perfect gush of sun from
morning till night. Some of the flats have the kitchen at the end, and
that's stupid; you can have a kitchen in any sort of hole, for you can
keep on the electrics, and with them the air is perfectly good. As soon
as I saw these chambers, and found out that they would let you keep a
dog, I told Mr. Makely to sign the lease instantly, and I would see to
the rest.”

She looked at me, and I praised the room and its dainty tastefulness to
her heart's content, so that she said: “Well, it's some satisfaction to
show you anything, Mr. Homos, you are so appreciative. I'm sure you'll
give a good account of us to the Altrurians. Well, now we'll go back to
the pa--drawing-room. This is the end of the story.”

“Well,” said her husband, with a wink at me, “I thought it was to be
continued in our next,” and he nodded towards the door that opened from
his wife's bower into the room adjoining.

“Why, you poor old fellow!” she shouted. “I forgot all about _your_
room,” and she dashed into it before us and began to show it off. It was
equipped with every bachelor luxury, and with every appliance for health
and comfort. “And here,” she said, “he can smoke, or anything, as long as
he keeps the door shut. Oh, good gracious! I forgot the bath-room,” and
they both united in showing me this, with its tiled floor and walls and
its porcelain tub; and then Mrs. Makely flew up the corridor before us.
“Put out the electrics, Dick!” she called back over her shoulder.




VI


When we were again seated in the drawing-room, which she had been so near
calling a parlor, she continued to bubble over with delight in herself
and her apartment. “Now, isn't it about perfect?” she urged, and I had to
own that it was indeed very convenient and very charming; and in the
rapture of the moment she invited me to criticise it.

“I see very little to criticise,” I said, “from your point of view; but I
hope you won't think it indiscreet if I ask a few questions?”

She laughed. “Ask anything, Mr. Homos! I hope I got hardened to your
questions in the mountains.”

“She said you used to get off some pretty tough ones,” said her husband,
helpless to take his eyes from her, although he spoke to me.

“It is about your servants,” I began.

“Oh, of course! Perfectly characteristic! Go on.”

“You told me that they had no natural light either in the kitchen or
their bedroom. Do they never see the light of day?”

The lady laughed heartily. “The waitress is in the front of the house
several hours every morning at her work, and they both have an afternoon
off once a week. Some people only let them go once a fortnight; but I
think they are human beings as well as we are, and I let them go every
week.”

“But, except for that afternoon once a week, your cook lives in
electric-light perpetually?”

“Electric-light is very healthy, and it doesn't heat the air!” the lady
triumphed, “I can assure you that she thinks she's very well off; and so
she is.” I felt a little temper in her voice, and I was silent, until she
asked me, rather stiffly, “Is there any _other_ inquiry you would
like to make?”

“Yes,” I said, “but I do not think you would like it.”

“Now, I assure you, Mr. Homos, you were never more mistaken in your life.
I perfectly delight in your naïveté. I know that the Altrurians don't
think as we do about some things, and I don't expect it. What is it you
would like to ask?”

“Well, why should you require your servants to go down on a different
elevator from yourselves?”

“Why, good gracious!” cried the lady.--“aren't they different from us in
_every_ way? To be sure, they dress up in their ridiculous best when
they go out, but you couldn't expect us to let them use the _front_
elevator? I don't want to go up and down with my own cook, and I
certainly don't with my neighbor's cook!”

“Yes, I suppose you would feel that an infringement of your social
dignity. But if you found yourself beside a cook in a horse-car or other
public conveyance, you would not feel personally affronted?”

“No, that is a very different thing. That is something we cannot control.
But, thank goodness, we can control our elevator, and if I were in a
house where I had to ride up and down with the servants I would no
more stay in it than I would in one where I couldn't keep a dog. I should
consider it a perfect outrage. I cannot understand you, Mr. Homos! You
are a gentleman, and you must have the traditions of a gentleman,
and yet you ask me such a thing as that!”

I saw a cast in her husband's eye which I took for a hint not to press
the matter, and so I thought I had better say, “It is only that in
Altruria we hold serving in peculiar honor.”

“Well,” said the lady, scornfully, “if you went and got your servants
from an intelligence-office, and had to look up their references, you
wouldn't hold them in very much honor. I tell you they look out for their
interests as sharply as we do for ours, and it's nothing between us but a
question of--”

“Business,” suggested her husband.

“Yes,” she assented, as if this clinched the matter.

“That's what I'm always telling you, Dolly, and yet you _will_ try
to make them your friends, as soon as you get them into your house. You
want them to love you, and you know that sentiment hasn't got anything
to do with it.”

“Well, I can't help it, Dick. I can't live with a person without trying
to like them and wanting them to like me. And then, when the ungrateful
things are saucy, or leave me in the lurch as they do half the time, it
almost breaks my heart. But I'm thankful to say that in these hard times
they won't be apt to leave a good place without a good reason.”

“Are there many seeking employment?” I asked this because I thought it
was safe ground.

“Well, they just stand around in the office as _thick!_” said the
lady. “And the Americans are trying to get places as well as the
foreigners. But I won't have Americans. They are too uppish, and they are
never half so well trained as the Swedes or the Irish. They still expect
to be treated as one of the family. I suppose,” she continued, with a
lingering ire in her voice, “that in Altruria you do treat them as one of
the family?”

“We have no servants, in the American sense,” I answered, as
inoffensively as I could.

Mrs. Makely irrelevantly returned to the question that had first provoked
her indignation. “And I should like to know how much worse it is to have
a back elevator for the servants than it is to have the basement door for
the servants, as you always do when you live in a separate house?”

“I should think it was no worse,” I admitted, and I thought this a good
chance to turn the talk from the dangerous channel it had taken. “I wish,
Mrs. Makely, you would tell me something about the way people live in
separate houses in New York.”

She was instantly pacified. “Why, I should be delighted. I only wish my
friend Mrs. Bellington Strange was back from Europe; then I could show
you a model house. I mean to take you there, as soon as she gets home.
She's a kind of Altrurian herself, you know. She was my dearest friend at
school, and it almost broke my heart when she married Mr. Strange, so
much older, and her inferior in every way. But she's got his money now,
and oh, the good she does do with it! I know you'll like each other, Mr.
Homos. I do wish Eva was at home!”

I said that I should be very glad to meet an American Altrurian, but that
now I wished she would tell me about the normal New York house, and what
was its animating principle, beginning with the basement door.

She laughed and said, “Why, it's just like any other house!”




VII


I can never insist enough, my dear Cyril, upon the illogicality of
American life. You know what the plutocratic principle is, and what the
plutocratic civilization should logically be. But the plutocratic
civilization is much better than it should logically be, bad as it is;
for the personal equation constantly modifies it, and renders it far less
dreadful than you would reasonably expect. That is, the potentialities of
goodness implanted in the human heart by the Creator forbid the
plutocratic man to be what the plutocratic scheme of life implies. He is
often merciful, kindly, and generous, as I have told you already, in
spite of conditions absolutely egotistical. You would think that the
Americans would be abashed in view of the fact that their morality is
often in contravention of their economic principles, but apparently they
are not so, and I believe that for the most part they are not aware of
the fact. Nevertheless, the fact is there, and you must keep it in mind,
if you would conceive of them rightly. You can in no other way account
for the contradictions which you will find in my experiences among them;
and these are often so bewildering that I have to take myself in hand,
from time to time, and ask myself what mad world I have fallen into, and
whether, after all, it is not a ridiculous nightmare. I am not sure that,
when I return and we talk these things over together, I shall be able to
overcome your doubts of my honesty, and I think that when I no longer
have them before my eyes I shall begin to doubt my own memory. But for
the present I can only set down what I at least seem to see, and trust
you to accept it, if you cannot understand it.

Perhaps I can aid you by suggesting that, logically, the Americans should
be what the Altrurians are, since their polity embodies our belief that
all men are born equal, with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness; but that illogically they are what the Europeans are, since
they still cling to the economical ideals of Europe, and hold that men
are born socially unequal, and deny them the liberty and happiness which
can come from equality alone. It is in their public life and civic life
that Altruria prevails; it is in their social and domestic life that
Europe prevails; and here, I think, is the severest penalty they must pay
for excluding women from political affairs; for women are at once the
best and the worst Americans: the best because their hearts are the
purest, the worst because their heads are the idlest. “Another
contradiction!” you will say, and I cannot deny it; for, with all their
cultivation, the American women have no real intellectual interests, but
only intellectual fads; and while they certainly think a great deal, they
reflect little, or not at all. The inventions and improvements which
have made their household work easy, the wealth that has released them in
such vast numbers from work altogether, has not enlarged them to the
sphere of duties which our Altrurian women share with us, but has left
them, with their quickened intelligences, the prey of the trivialities
which engross the European women, and which have formed the life of the
sex hitherto in every country where women have an economical and social
freedom without the political freedom that can alone give it dignity and
import. They have a great deal of beauty, and they are inconsequently
charming; I need not tell you that they are romantic and heroic, or that
they would go to the stake for a principle, if they could find one, as
willingly as any martyr of the past; but they have not much more
perspective than children, and their reading and their talk about reading
seem not to have broadened their mental horizons beyond the old sunrise
and the old sunset of the kitchen and the parlor.

In fine, the American house as it is, the American household, is what the
American woman makes it and wills it to be, whether she wishes it to be
so or not; for I often find that the American woman wills things that she
in no wise wishes. What the normal New York house is, however, I had
great difficulty in getting Mrs. Makely to tell me, for, as she said
quite frankly, she could not imagine my not knowing. She asked me if I
really wanted her to begin at the beginning, and, when I said that I did,
she took a little more time to laugh at the idea, and then she said, “I
suppose you mean a brown-stone, four-story house in the middle of a
block?”

“Yes, I think that is what I mean,” I said.

“Well,” she began, “those high steps that they all have, unless they're
English-basement houses, really give them another story, for people used
to dine in the front room of their basements. You've noticed the little
front yard, about as big as a handkerchief, generally, and the steps
leading down to the iron gate, which is kept locked, and the basement
door inside the gate? Well, that's what you might call the back elevator
of a house, for it serves the same purpose: the supplies are brought in
there, and market-men go in and out, and the ashes, and the swill, and
the servants--that you object to so much. We have no alleys in New York,
the blocks are so narrow, north and south; and, of course, we have no
back doors; so we have to put the garbage out on the sidewalk--and it's
nasty enough, goodness knows. Underneath the sidewalk there are bins
where people keep their coal and kindling. You've noticed the gratings in
the pavements?”

I said yes, and I was ashamed to own that at first I had thought them
some sort of registers for tempering the cold in winter; this would have
appeared ridiculous in the last degree to my hostess, for the Americans
have as yet no conception of publicly modifying the climate, as we do.

“Back of what used to be the dining-room, and what is now used for a
laundry, generally, is the kitchen, with closets between, of course, and
then the back yard, which some people make very pleasant with shrubs and
vines; the kitchen is usually dark and close, and the girls can only get
a breath of fresh air in the yard; I like to see them; but generally it's
taken up with clothes-lines, for people in houses nearly all have their
washing done at home. Over the kitchen is the dining-room, which takes up
the whole of the first floor, with the pantry, and it almost always has a
bay-window out of it; of course, that overhangs the kitchen, and darkens
it a little more, but it makes the dining-room so pleasant. I tell my
husband that I should be almost willing to live in a house again, just on
account of the dining-room bay-window. I had it full of flowers in pots,
for the southern sun came in; and then the yard was so nice for the dog;
you didn't have to take him out for exercise, yourself; he chased the
cats there and got plenty of it. I must say that the cats on the back
fences were a drawback at night; to be sure, we have them here, too; it's
seven stories down, but you do hear them, along in the spring. The
parlor, or drawing-room, is usually rather long, and runs from the
dining-room to the front of the house, though where the house is very
deep they have a sort of middle room, or back parlor. Dick, get some
paper and draw it. Wouldn't you like to see a plan of the floor?”

I said that I should, and she bade her husband make it like their old
house in West Thirty-third Street. We all looked at it together.

“This is the front door,” Mrs. Makely explained, “where people come in,
and then begins the misery of a house--stairs! They mostly go up
straight, but sometimes they have them curve a little, and in the new
houses the architects have all sorts of little dodges for squaring them
and putting landings. Then, on the second floor--draw it, Dick--you have
two nice, large chambers, with plenty of light and air, before and
behind. I do miss the light and air in a flat, there's no denying it.”

“You'll go back to a house yet, Dolly,” said her husband.

“Never!” she almost shrieked, and he winked at me, as if it were the best
joke in the world. “Never, as long as houses have stairs!”

“Put in an elevator,” he suggested.

“Well, that is what Eveleth Strange has, and she lets the servants use
it, too,” and Mrs. Makely said, with a look at me: “I suppose that would
please you, Mr. Homos. Well, there's a nice side-room over the front door
here, and a bath-room at the rear. Then you have more stairs, and large
chambers, and two side-rooms. That makes plenty of chambers for a small
family. I used to give two of the third-story rooms to my two girls. I
ought really to have made them sleep in one; it seemed such a shame to
let the cook have a whole large room to herself; but I had nothing else
to do with it, and she did take such comfort in it, poor old thing! You
see, the rooms came wrong in our house, for it fronted north, and I had
to give the girls sunny rooms or else give them front rooms, so that it
was as broad as it was long. I declare, I was perplexed about it the
whole time we lived there, it seemed so perfectly anomalous.”

“And what is an English-basement house like?” I ventured to ask, in
interruption of the retrospective melancholy she had fallen into.

“Oh, _never_ live in an English-basement house, if you value your
spine!” cried the lady. “An English-basement house is nothing _but_
stairs. In the first place, it's only one room wide, and it's a story
higher than the high-stoop house. It's one room forward and one back, the
whole way up; and in an English-basement it's always _up_, and
_never_ down. If I had my way, there wouldn't one stone be left upon
another in the English-basements in New York.”

I have suffered Mrs. Makely to be nearly as explicit to you as she was to
me; for the kind of house she described is of the form ordinarily
prevailing in all American cities, and you can form some idea from it how
city people live here. I ought perhaps to tell you that such a house is
fitted with every housekeeping convenience, and that there is hot and
cold water throughout, and gas everywhere. It has fireplaces in all the
rooms, where fires are often kept burning for pleasure; but it is really
heated from a furnace in the basement, through large pipes carried to the
different stories, and opening into them by some such registers as we
use. The separate houses sometimes have steam-heating, but not often.
They each have their drainage into the sewer of the street, and this is
trapped and trapped again, as in the houses of our old plutocratic
cities, to keep the poison of the sewer from getting into the houses.




VIII


You will be curious to know something concerning the cost of living in
such a house, and you may be sure that I did not fail to question Mrs.
Makely on this point. She was at once very volubly communicative; she
told me all she knew, and, as her husband said, a great deal more.

“Why, of course,” she began, “you can spend all you have in New York, if
you like, and people do spend fortunes every year. But I suppose you mean
the average cost of living in a brown-stone house, in a good block, that
rents for $1800 or $2000 a year, with a family of three or four children,
and two servants. Well, what should you say, Dick?”

“Ten or twelve thousand a year--fifteen,” answered her husband.

“Yes, fully that,” she answered, with an effect of disappointment in his
figures. “We had just ourselves, and we never spent less than seven, and
we didn't dress, and we didn't entertain, either, to speak of. But you
have to live on a certain scale, and generally you live up to your
income.”

“Quite,” said Mr. Makely.

“I don't know what makes it cost so. Provisions are cheap enough, and
they say people live in as good style for a third less in London. There
used to be a superstition that you could live for less in a flat, and
they always talk to you about the cost of a furnace, and a man to tend it
and keep the snow shovelled off your sidewalk, but that is all stuff.
Five hundred dollars will make up the whole difference, and more. You pay
quite as much rent for a decent flat, and then you don't get half the
room. No, if it wasn't for the stairs, I wouldn't live in a flat for an
instant. But that makes all the difference.”

“And the young people,” I urged--“those who are just starting in
life--how do they manage? Say when the husband has $1500 or $2000 a
year?”

“Poor things!” she returned. “I don't know how they manage. They board
till they go distracted, or they dry up and blow away; or else the wife
has a little money, too, and they take a small flat and ruin themselves.
Of course, they want to live nicely and like other people.”

“But if they didn't?”

“Why, then they could live delightfully. My husband says he often wishes
he was a master-mechanic in New York, with a thousand a year, and a flat
for twelve dollars a month; he would have the best time in the world.”

Her husband nodded his acquiescence. “Fighting-cock wouldn't be in it,”
 he said. “Trouble is, we all want to do the swell thing.”

“But you can't all do it,” I ventured, “and, from what I see of the
simple, out-of-the-way neighborhoods in my walks, you don't all try.”

“Why, no,” he said. “Some of us were talking about that the other night
at the club, and one of the fellows was saying that he believed there was
as much old-fashioned, quiet, almost countrified life in New York, among
the great mass of the people, as you'd find in any city in the world.
Said you met old codgers that took care of their own furnaces, just as
you would in a town of five thousand inhabitants.”

“Yes, that's all very well,” said his wife; “but they wouldn't be nice
people. Nice people want to live nicely. And so they live beyond their
means or else they scrimp and suffer. I don't know which is worst.”

“But there is no obligation to do either?” I asked.

“Oh yes, there is,” she returned. “If you've been born in a certain way,
and brought up in a certain way, you can't get out of it. You simply
can't. You have got to keep in it till you drop. Or a woman has.”

“That means the woman's husband, too,” said Mr. Makely, with his wink for
me. “Always die together.”

In fact, there is the same competition in the social world as in the
business world; and it is the ambition of every American to live in some
such house as the New York house; and as soon as a village begins to
grow into a town, such houses are built. Still, the immensely greater
number of the Americans necessarily live so simply and cheaply that such
a house would be almost as strange to them as to an Altrurian. But while
we should regard its furnishings as vulgar and unwholesome, most
Americans would admire and covet its rich rugs or carpets, its papered
walls, and thickly curtained windows, and all its foolish ornamentation,
and most American women would long to have a house like the ordinary
high-stoop New York house, that they might break their backs over its
stairs, and become invalids, and have servants about them to harass them
and hate them.

Of course, I put it too strongly, for there is often, illogically, a
great deal of love between the American women and their domestics, though
why there should be any at all I cannot explain, except by reference to
that mysterious personal equation which modifies all conditions here. You
will have made your reflection that the servants, as they are cruelly
called (I have heard them called so in their hearing, and wondered they
did not fly tooth and nail at the throat that uttered the insult), form
really no part of the house, but are aliens in the household and the
family life. In spite of this fact, much kindness grows up between them
and the family, and they do not always slight the work that I cannot
understand their ever having any heart in. Often they do slight it, and
they insist unsparingly upon the scanty privileges which their mistresses
seem to think a monstrous invasion of their own rights. The habit of
oppression grows upon the oppressor, and you would find tender-hearted
women here, gentle friends, devoted wives, loving mothers, who would be
willing that their domestics should remain indoors, week in and week out,
and, where they are confined in the ridiculous American flat, never see
the light of day. In fact, though the Americans do not know it, and would
be shocked to be told it, their servants are really slaves, who are none
the less slaves because they cannot be beaten, or bought and sold except
by the week or month, and for the price which they fix themselves, and
themselves receive in the form of wages. They are social outlaws, so far
as the society of the family they serve is concerned, and they are
restricted in the visits they receive and pay among themselves. They are
given the worst rooms in the house, and they are fed with the food that
they have prepared, only when it comes cold from the family table; in the
wealthier houses, where many of them are kept, they are supplied with a
coarser and cheaper victual bought and cooked for them apart from that
provided for the family. They are subject, at all hours, to the pleasure
or caprice of the master or mistress. Every circumstance of their life is
an affront to that just self-respect which even Americans allow is the
right of every human being. With the rich, they are said to be sometimes
indolent, dishonest, mendacious, and all that Plato long ago explained
that slaves must be; but in the middle-class families they are mostly
faithful, diligent, and reliable in a degree that would put to shame most
men who hold positions of trust, and would leave many ladies whom they
relieve of work without ground for comparison.




IX


After Mrs. Makely had told me about the New York house, we began to talk
of the domestic service, and I ventured to hint some of the things that I
have so plainly said to you. She frankly consented to my whole view of
the matter, for if she wishes to make an effect or gain a point she has a
magnanimity that stops at nothing short of self-devotion. “I know it,”
 she said. “You are perfectly right; but here we are, and what are we to
do? What do you do in Altruria, I should like to know?”

I said that in Altruria we all worked, and that personal service was
honored among us like medical attendance in America; I did not know what
other comparison to make; but I said that any one in health would think
it as unwholesome and as immoral to let another serve him as to let a
doctor physic him. At this Mrs. Makely and her husband laughed so that I
found myself unable to go on for some moments, till Mrs. Makely, with a
final shriek, shouted to him: “Dick, do stop, or I shall die! Excuse me,
Mr. Homos, but you are so deliciously funny, and I know you're just
joking. You _won't_ mind my laughing? Do go on.”

I tried to give her some notion as to how we manage, in our common life,
which we have simplified so much beyond anything that this barbarous
people dream of; and she grew a little soberer as I went on, and seemed
at least to believe that I was not, as her husband said, stuffing them;
but she ended, as they always do here, by saying that it might be all
very well in Altruria, but it would never do in America, and that it was
contrary to human nature to have so many things done in common. “Now,
I'll tell you,” she said. “After we broke up housekeeping in Thirty-third
Street, we stored our furniture--”

“Excuse me,” I said. “How--stored?”

“Oh, I dare say you never store your furniture in Altruria. But here we
have hundreds of storage warehouses of all sorts and sizes, packed with
furniture that people put into them when they go to Europe, or get sick
to death of servants and the whole bother of house-keeping; and that's
what we did; and then, as my husband says, we browsed about for a year
or two. First, we tried hotelling it, and we took a hotel apartment
furnished, and dined at the hotel table, until I certainly thought I
should go off, I got so tired of it. Then we hired a suite in one of the
family hotels that there are so many of, and got out enough of our
things to furnish it, and had our meals in our rooms; they let you do
that for the same price, often they are _glad_ to have you, for the
dining-room is so packed. But everything got to tasting just the same as
everything else, and my husband had the dyspepsia so bad he couldn't half
attend to business, and I suffered from indigestion myself, cooped up in
a few small rooms, that way; and the dog almost died; and finally we gave
that up, and took an apartment, and got out our things--the storage cost
as much as the rent of a small house--and put them into it, and had a
caterer send in the meals as they do in Europe. But it isn't the same
here as it is in Europe, and we got so sick of it in a month that I
thought I should scream when I saw the same old dishes coming on the
table, day after day. We had to keep one servant--excuse me, Mr. Homos:
_domestic_--anyway, to look after the table and the parlor and
chamber work, and my husband said we might as well be hung for a sheep as
a lamb, and so we got in a cook; and, bad as it is, it's twenty million
times better than anything else you can do. Servants are a plague, but
you have got to have them, and so I have resigned myself to the will of
Providence. If they don't like it, neither do I, and so I fancy it's
about as broad as it's long.” I have found this is a favorite phrase of
Mrs. Makely's, and that it seems to give her a great deal of comfort.

“And you don't feel that there's any harm in it?” I ventured to ask.

“Harm in it?” she repeated. “Why, aren't the poor things glad to get the
work? What would they do without it?”

“From what I see of your conditions I should be afraid that they would
starve,” I said.

“Yes, they can't all get places in shops or restaurants, and they have to
do something, or starve, as you say,” she said; and she seemed to think
what I had said was a concession to her position.

“But if it were your own case?” I suggested. “If you had no alternatives
but starvation and domestic service, you would think there was harm in
it, even although you were glad to take a servant's place?”

I saw her flush, and she answered, haughtily, “You must excuse me if I
refuse to imagine myself taking a servant's place, even for the sake of
argument.”

“And you are quite right,” I said. “Your American instinct is too strong
to brook even in imagination the indignities which seem daily, hourly,
and momently inflicted upon servants in your system.”

To my great astonishment she seemed delighted by this conclusion. “Yes,”
 she said, and she smiled radiantly, “and now you understand how it is
that American girls won't go out to service, though the pay is so much
better and they are so much better housed and fed--and everything.
Besides,” she added, with an irrelevance which always amuses her husband,
though I should be alarmed by it for her sanity if I did not find it so
characteristic of women here, who seem to be mentally characterized by
the illogicality of the civilization, “they're not half so good as the
foreign servants. They've been brought up in homes of their own, and
they're uppish, and they have no idea of anything but third-rate
boarding-house cooking, and they're always hoping to get married, so
that, really, you have no peace of your life with them.”

“And it never seems to you that the whole relation is wrong?” I asked.

“What relation?”

“That between maid and mistress, the hirer and the hireling.”

“Why, good gracious!” she burst out. “Didn't Christ himself say that the
laborer was worthy of his hire? And how would you get your work done, if
you didn't pay for it?”

“It might be done for you, when you could not do it yourself, from
affection.”

“From affection!” she returned, with the deepest derision. “Well, I
rather think I _shall_ have to do it myself if I want it done
from affection! But I suppose you think I _ought_ to do it
myself, as the Altrurian ladies do! I can tell you that in America it
would be impossible for a lady to do her own work, and there are no
intelligence-offices where you can find girls that want to work for love.
It's as broad as it's long.”

“It's simply business,” her husband said.

They were right, my dear friend, and I was wrong, strange as it must
appear to you. The tie of service, which we think as sacred as the tie of
blood, can be here only a business relation, and in these conditions
service must forever be grudgingly given and grudgingly paid. There is
something in it, I do not quite know what, for I can never place myself
precisely in an American's place, that degrades the poor creatures who
serve, so that they must not only be social outcasts, but must leave such
a taint of dishonor on their work that one cannot even do it for one's
self without a sense of outraged dignity. You might account for this in
Europe, where ages of prescriptive wrong have distorted the relation out
of all human wholesomeness and Christian loveliness; but in America,
where many, and perhaps most, of those who keep servants and call them so
are but a single generation from fathers who earned their bread by the
sweat of their brows, and from mothers who nobly served in all household
offices, it is in the last degree bewildering. I can only account for it
by that bedevilment of the entire American ideal through the retention of
the English economy when the English polity was rejected. But at the
heart of America there is this ridiculous contradiction, and it must
remain there until the whole country is Altrurianized. There is no other
hope; but I did not now urge this point, and we turned to talk of other
things, related to the matters we had been discussing.

“The men,” said Mrs. Makely, “get out of the whole bother very nicely, as
long as they are single, and even when they're married they are apt to
run off to the club when there's a prolonged upheaval in the kitchen.”

“_I_ don't, Dolly,” suggested her husband.

“No, _you_ don't, Dick,” she returned, fondly. “But there are not
many like you.”

He went on, with a wink at me, “I never live at the club, except in
summer, when you go away to the mountains.”

“Well, you know I can't very well take you with me,” she said.

“Oh, I couldn't leave my business, anyway,” he said, and he laughed.




X


I had noticed the vast and splendid club-houses in the best places in the
city, and I had often wondered about their life, which seemed to me a
blind groping towards our own, though only upon terms that forbade it to
those who most needed it. The clubs here are not like our groups, the
free association of sympathetic people, though one is a little more
literary, or commercial, or scientific, or political than another; but
the entrance to each is more or less jealously guarded; there is an
initiation-fee, and there are annual dues, which are usually heavy enough
to exclude all but the professional and business classes, though there
are, of course, successful artists and authors in them. During the past
winter I visited some of the most characteristic, where I dined and
supped with the members, or came alone when one of these put me down, for
a fortnight or a month.

They are equipped with kitchens and cellars, and their wines and dishes
are of the best. Each is, in fact, like a luxurious private house on a
large scale; outwardly they are palaces, and inwardly they have every
feature and function of a princely residence complete, even to a certain
number of guest-chambers, where members may pass the night, or stay
indefinitely in some cases, and actually live at the club. The club,
however, is known only to the cities and larger towns, in this highly
developed form; to the ordinary, simple American of the country, or of
the country town of five or ten thousand people, a New York club would be
as strange as it would be to any Altrurian.

“Do many of the husbands left behind in the summer live at the club?” I
asked.

“All that _have_ a club do,” he said. “Often there's a very good
table d'hôte dinner that you couldn't begin to get for the same price
anywhere else; and there are a lot of good fellows there, and you can
come pretty near forgetting that you're homeless, or even that you're
married.”

He laughed, and his wife said: “You ought to be ashamed, Dick; and me
worrying about you all the time I'm away, and wondering what the cook
gives you here. Yes,” she continued, addressing me, “that's the worst
thing about the clubs. They make the men so comfortable that they say
it's one of the principal obstacles to early marriages. The young men try
to get lodgings near them, so that they can take their meals there, and
they know they get much better things to eat than they could have in a
house of their own at a great deal more expense, and so they simply don't
think of getting married. Of course,” she said, with that wonderful,
unintentional, or at least unconscious, frankness of hers, “I don't blame
the clubs altogether. There's no use denying that girls are expensively
brought up, and that a young man has to think twice before taking one of
them out of the kind of home she's used to and putting her into the kind
of home he can give her. If the clubs have killed early marriages,
the women have created the clubs.”

“Do women go much to them?” I asked, choosing this question as a safe
one.

“_Much_!” she screamed. “They don't go at all! They _can't_!
They won't _let_ us! To be sure, there are some that have rooms
where ladies can go with their friends who are members, and have lunch or
dinner; but as for seeing the inside of the club-house proper, where
these great creatures”--she indicated her husband--“are sitting up,
smoking and telling stories, it isn't to be dreamed of.”

Her husband laughed. “You wouldn't like the smoking, Dolly.”

“Nor the stories, some of them,” she retorted.

“Oh, the stories are always first-rate,” he said, and he laughed more
than before.

“And they never gossip at the clubs, Mr. Homos--never!” she added.

“Well, hardly ever,” said her husband, with an intonation that I did not
understand. It seemed to be some sort of catch-phrase.

“All I know,” said Mrs. Makely, “is that I like to have my husband belong
to his club. It's a nice place for him in summer; and very often in
winter, when I'm dull, or going out somewhere that he hates, he can go
down to his club and smoke a cigar, and come home just about the time I
get in, and it's much better than worrying through the evening with a
book. He hates books, poor Dick!” She looked fondly at him, as if this
were one of the greatest merits in the world. “But I confess I shouldn't
like him to be a mere club man, like some of them.”

“But how?” I asked.

“Why, belonging to five or six, or more, even; and spending their whole
time at them, when they're not at business.”

There was a pause, and Mr. Makely put on an air of modest worth, which he
carried off with his usual wink towards me. I said, finally, “And if the
ladies are not admitted to the men's clubs, why don't they have clubs of
their own?”

“Oh, they have--several, I believe. But who wants to go and meet a lot of
women? You meet enough of them in society, goodness knows. You hardly
meet any one else, especially at afternoon teas. They bore you to death.”

Mrs. Makely's nerves seemed to lie in the direction of a prolongation of
this subject, and I asked my next question a little away from it. “I wish
you would tell me, Mrs. Makely, something about your way of provisioning
your household. You said that the grocer's and butcher's man came up to
the kitchen with your supplies--”

“Yes, and the milkman and the iceman; the iceman always puts the ice into
the refrigerator; it's very convenient, and quite like your own house.”

“But you go out and select the things yourself the day before, or in the
morning?”

“Oh, not at all! The men come and the cook gives the order; she knows
pretty well what we want on the different days, and I never meddle with
it from one week's end to the other, unless we have friends. The
tradespeople send in their bills at the end of the month, and that's all
there is of it.” Her husband gave me one of his queer looks, and she went
on: “When we were younger, and just beginning housekeeping, I used to go
out and order the things myself; I used even to go to the big markets,
and half kill myself trying to get things a little cheaper at one place
and another, and waste more car-fare and lay up more doctor's bills than
it would all come to, ten times over. I used to fret my life out,
remembering the prices; but now, thank goodness, that's all over. I don't
know any more what beef is a pound than my husband does; if a thing isn't
good, I send it straight back, and that puts them on their honor, you
know, and they have to give me the best of everything. The bills average
about the same, from month to month; a little more if we have company
but if they're too outrageous, I make a fuss with the cook, and she
scolds the men, and then it goes better for a while. Still, it's a great
bother.”

I confess that I did not see what the bother was, but I had not the
courage to ask, for I had already conceived a wholesome dread of the
mystery of an American lady's nerves. So I merely suggested, “And that is
the way that people usually manage?”

“Why,” she said, “I suppose that some old-fashioned people still do their
marketing, and people that have to look to their outgoes, and know what
every mouthful costs them. But their lives are not worth having. Eveleth
Strange does it--or she did do it when she was in the country; I dare say
she won't when she gets back--just from a sense of duty, and because she
says that a housekeeper ought to know about her expenses. But I ask her
who will care whether she knows or not; and as for giving the money to
the poor that she saves by spending economically, I tell her that the
butchers and the grocers have to live, too, as well as the poor, and so
it's as broad as it's long.”




XI


I could not make out whether Mr. Makely approved of his wife's philosophy
or not; I do not believe he thought much about it. The money probably
came easily with him, and he let it go easily, as an American likes to
do. There is nothing penurious or sordid about this curious people, so
fierce in the pursuit of riches. When these are once gained, they seem to
have no value to the man who has won them, and he has generally no object
in life but to see his womankind spend them.

This is the season of the famous Thanksgiving, which has now become the
national holiday, but has no longer any savor in it of the grim
Puritanism it sprang from. It is now appointed by the president and the
governors of the several states, in proclamations enjoining a pious
gratitude upon the people for their continued prosperity as a nation, and
a public acknowledgment of the divine blessings. The blessings are
supposed to be of the material sort, grouped in the popular imagination
as good times, and it is hard to see what they are when hordes of men and
women of every occupation are feeling the pinch of poverty in their
different degrees. It is not merely those who have always the wolf at
their doors who are now suffering, but those whom the wolf never
threatened before; those who amuse as well as those who serve the rich
are alike anxious and fearful, where they are not already in actual want;
thousands of poor players, as well as hundreds of thousands of poor
laborers, are out of employment, and the winter threatens to be one of
dire misery. Yet you would not imagine from the smiling face of things,
as you would see it in the better parts of this great city, that there
was a heavy heart or an empty stomach anywhere below it. In fact, people
here are so used to seeing other people in want that it no longer affects
them as reality; it is merely dramatic, or hardly so lifelike as that--it
is merely histrionic. It is rendered still more spectacular to the
imaginations of the fortunate by the melodrama of charity they are
invited to take part in by endless appeals, and their fancy is flattered
by the notion that they are curing the distress they are only slightly
relieving by a gift from their superfluity. The charity, of course, is
better than nothing, but it is a fleeting mockery of the trouble, at the
best. If it were proposed that the city should subsidize a theatre a
which the idle players could get employment in producing good plays at a
moderate cost to the people, the notion would not be considered more
ridiculous than that of founding municipal works for the different sorts
of idle workers; and it would not be thought half so nefarious, for the
proposition to give work by the collectivity is supposed to be in
contravention of the sacred principle of monopolistic competition so
dear to the American economist, and it would be denounced as an
approximation to the surrender of the city to anarchism and destruction
by dynamite.

But as I have so often said, the American life is in no wise logical, and
you will not be surprised, though you may be shocked or amused, to learn
that the festival of Thanksgiving is now so generally devoted to
witnessing a game of football between the elevens of two great
universities that the services at the churches are very scantily
attended. The Americans are practical, if they are not logical, and this
preference of football to prayer and praise on Thanksgiving-day has gone
so far that now a principal church in the city holds its services on
Thanksgiving-eve, so that the worshippers may not be tempted to keep away
from their favorite game.

There is always a heavy dinner at home after the game, to console the
friends of those who have lost and to heighten the joy of the winning
side, among the comfortable people. The poor recognize the day largely
as a sort of carnival. They go about in masquerade on the eastern
avenues, and the children of the foreign races who populate that quarter
penetrate the better streets, blowing horns and begging of the passers.
They have probably no more sense of its difference from the old carnival
of Catholic Europe than from the still older Saturnalia of pagan times.
Perhaps you will say that a masquerade is no more pagan than a football
game; and I confess that I have a pleasure in that innocent
misapprehension of the holiday on the East Side. I am not more censorious
of it than I am of the displays of festival cheer at the provision-stores
or green-groceries throughout the city at this time. They are almost as
numerous on the avenues as the drinking-saloons, and, thanks to them, the
tasteful housekeeping is at least convenient in a high degree. The waste
is inevitable with the system of separate kitchens, and it is not in
provisions alone, but in labor and in time, a hundred cooks doing the
work of one; but the Americans have no conception of our co-operative
housekeeping, and so the folly goes on.

Meantime the provision-stores add much to their effect of crazy gayety on
the avenues. The variety and harmony of colors is very great, and this
morning I stood so long admiring the arrangement in one of them that I am
afraid I rendered myself a little suspicious to the policeman guarding
the liquor-store on the nearest corner; there seems always to be a
policeman assigned to this duty. The display was on either side of the
provisioner's door, and began, on one hand, with a basal line of pumpkins
well out on the sidewalk. Then it was built up with the soft white and
cool green of cauliflowers and open boxes of red and white grapes, to the
window that flourished in banks of celery and rosy apples. On the other
side, gray-green squashes formed the foundation, and the wall was sloped
upward with the delicious salads you can find here, the dark red of
beets, the yellow of carrots, and the blue of cabbages. The association
of colors was very artistic, and even the line of mutton carcasses
overhead, with each a brace of grouse or half a dozen quail in its
embrace, and flanked with long sides of beef at the four ends of the
line, was picturesque, though the sight of the carnage at the
provision-stores here would always be dreadful to an Altrurian; in the
great markets it is intolerable. This sort of business is mostly in the
hands of the Germans, who have a good eye for such effects as may be
studied in it; but the fruiterers are nearly all Italians, and their
stalls are charming. I always like, too, the cheeriness of the chestnut
and peanut ovens of the Italians; the pleasant smell and friendly smoke
that rise from them suggest a simple and homelike life which there are so
any things in this great, weary, heedless city to make one forget.




XII


But I am allowing myself to wander too far from Mrs. Makely and her
letter, which reached me only two days before Thanksgiving.


“MY DEAR MR. HOMOS,--Will you give me the pleasure of your company at
dinner, on Thanksgiving-day, at eight o'clock, very informally. My
friend, Mrs. Bellington Strange, has unexpectedly returned from Europe
within the week, and I am asking a few friends, whom I can trust to
excuse this very short notice, to meet her.

“With Mr. Makely's best regards,

“Yours cordially,

“DOROTHEA MAKELY.

“The Sphinx,

“November the twenty sixth,

“Eighteen hundred and Ninety-three.”


I must tell you that it has been a fad with the ladies here to spell out
their dates, and, though the fashion is waning, Mrs. Makely is a woman
who would remain in such an absurdity among the very last. I will let you
make your own conclusions concerning this, for though, as an Altrurian, I
cannot respect her, I like her so much, and have so often enjoyed her
generous hospitality, that I cannot bring myself to criticise her except
by the implication of the facts. She is anomalous, but, to our way of
thinking, all the Americans I have met are anomalous, and she has the
merits that you would not logically attribute to her character. Of
course, I cannot feel that her evident regard for me is the least of
these, though I like to think that it is founded on more reason than the
rest.

I have by this time become far too well versed in the polite
insincerities of the plutocratic world to imagine that, because she asked
me to come to her dinner very informally, I was not to come in all the
state I could put into my dress. You know what the evening dress of men
is here, from the costumes in our museum, and you can well believe that I
never put on those ridiculous black trousers without a sense of their
grotesqueness--that scrap of waistcoat reduced to a mere rim, so as to
show the whole white breadth of the starched shirt-bosom, and that coat
chopped away till it seems nothing but tails and lapels. It is true that
I might go out to dinner in our national costume; in fact, Mrs. Makely
has often begged me to wear it, for she says the Chinese wear theirs; but
I have not cared to make the sensation which I must if I wore it; my
outlandish views of life and my frank study of their customs signalize me
quite sufficiently among the Americans.

At the hour named I appeared in Mrs. Makely's drawing-room in all the
formality that I knew her invitation, to come very informally, really
meant. I found myself the first, as I nearly always do, but I had only
time for a word or two with my hostess before the others began to come.
She hastily explained that as soon as she knew Mrs. Strange was in New
York she had despatched a note telling her that I was still here; and
that as she could not get settled in time to dine at home, she must come
and take Thanksgiving dinner with her. “She will have to go out with Mr.
Makely; but I am going to put you next to her at table, for I want you
both to have a good time. But don't you forget that you are going to take
_me_ out.”

I said that I should certainly not forget it, and I showed her the
envelope with my name on the outside, and hers on a card inside, which
the serving-man at the door had given me in the hall, as the first token
that the dinner was to be unceremonious.

She laughed, and said: “I've had the luck to pick up two or three other
agreeable people that I know will be glad to meet you. Usually it's such
a scratch lot at Thanksgiving, for everybody dines at home that can, and
you have to trust to the highways and the byways for your guests, if you
give a dinner. But I did want to bring Mrs. Strange and you together, and
so I chanced it. Of course, it's a sent-in dinner, as you must have
inferred from the man at the door; I've given my servants a holiday, and
had Claret's people do the whole thing. It's as broad as it's long, and,
as my husband says, you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb; and
it saves bother. Everybody will know it's sent in, so that nobody will be
deceived. There'll be a turkey in it somewhere, and cranberry sauce; I've
insisted on that; but it won't be a regular American Thanksgiving dinner,
and I'm rather sorry, on your account, for I wanted you to see one, and I
meant to have had you here, just with ourselves; but Eveleth Strange's
coming back put a new face on things, and so I've gone in for this
affair, which isn't at all what you would like. That's the reason I tell
you at once it's sent in.”




XIII


I am so often at a loss for the connection in Mrs. Makely's ideas that I
am more patient with her incoherent jargon than you will be, I am afraid.
It went on to much the effect that I have tried to report until the
moment she took the hand of the guest who came next. They arrived, until
there were eight of us in all, Mrs. Strange coming last, with excuses for
being late. I had somehow figured her as a person rather mystical and
recluse in appearance, perhaps on account of her name, and I had imagined
her tall and superb. But she was, really, rather small, though not below
the woman's average, and she had a face more round than otherwise, with a
sort of business-like earnestness, but a very charming smile, and
presently, as I saw, an American sense of humor. She had brown hair and
gray eyes, and teeth not too regular to be monotonous; her mouth was very
sweet, whether she laughed or sat gravely silent. She at once affected me
like a person who had been sobered beyond her nature by responsibilities,
and had steadily strengthened under the experiences of life. She was
dressed with a sort of personal taste, in a rich gown of black lace,
which came up to her throat; and she did not subject me to that
embarrassment I always feel in the presence of a lady who is much
décolletée, when I sit next her or face to face with her: I cannot always
look at her without a sense of taking an immodest advantage. Sometimes I
find a kind of pathos in this sacrifice of fashion, which affects me as
if the poor lady were wearing that sort of gown because she thought she
really ought, and then I keep my eyes firmly on hers, or avert them
altogether; but there are other cases which have not this appealing
quality. Yet in the very worst of the cases it would be a mistake to
suppose that there was a display personally meant of the display
personally made. Even then it would be found that the gown was worn so
because the dressmaker had made it so, and, whether she had made it
in this country or in Europe, that she had made it in compliance with a
European custom. In fact, all the society customs of the Americans follow
some European original, and usually some English original; and it is only
fair to say that in this particular custom they do not go to the English
extreme.

We did not go out to dinner at Mrs. Makely's by the rules of English
precedence, because there are nominally no ranks here, and we could not;
but I am sure it will not be long before the Americans will begin playing
at precedence just as they now play at the other forms of aristocratic
society. For the present, however, there was nothing for us to do but to
proceed, when dinner was served, in such order as offered itself, after
Mr. Makely gave his arm to Mrs. Strange; though, of course, the white
shoulders of the other ladies went gleaming out before the white
shoulders of Mrs. Makely shone beside my black ones. I have now become so
used to these observances that they no longer affect me as they once did,
and as I suppose my account of them must affect you, painfully,
comically. But I have always the sense of having a part in amateur
theatricals, and I do not see how the Americans can fail to have the same
sense, for there is nothing spontaneous in them, and nothing that has
grown even dramatically out of their own life.

Often when I admire the perfection of the stage-setting, it is with a
vague feeling that I am derelict in not offering it an explicit applause.
In fact, this is permitted in some sort and measure, as now when we sat
down at Mrs. Makely's exquisite table, and the ladies frankly recognized
her touch in it. One of them found a phrase for it at once, and
pronounced it a symphony in chrysanthemums; for the color and the
character of these flowers played through all the appointments of the
table, and rose to a magnificent finale in the vast group in the middle
of the board, infinite in their caprices of tint and design. Another lady
said that it was a dream, and then Mrs. Makely said, “No, a memory,” and
confessed that she had studied the effect from her recollection of some
tables at a chrysanthemum show held here year before last, which seemed
failures because they were so simply and crudely adapted in the china and
napery to merely one kind and color of the flower.

“Then,” she added, “I wanted to do something very chrysanthemummy,
because it seems to me the Thanksgiving flower, and belongs to
Thanksgiving quite as much as holly belongs to Christmas.”

Everybody applauded her intention, and they hungrily fell to upon the
excellent oysters, with her warning that we had better make the most of
everything in its turn, for she had conformed her dinner to the brevity
of the notice she had given her guests.




XIV


Just what the dinner was I will try to tell you, for I think that it will
interest you to know what people here think a very simple dinner. That
is, people of any degree of fashion; for the unfashionable Americans, who
are innumerably in the majority, have, no more than the Altrurians, seen
such a dinner as Mrs. Makely's. This sort generally sit down to a single
dish of meat, with two or three vegetables, and they drink tea or coffee,
or water only, with their dinner. Even when they have company, as they
say, the things are all put on the table at once; and the average of
Americans who have seen a dinner served in courses, after the Russian
manner, invariable in the fine world here, is not greater than those who
have seen a serving-man in livery. Among these the host piles up his
guest's plate with meat and vegetables, and it is passed from hand to
hand till it reaches him; his drink arrives from the hostess by the same
means. One maid serves the table in a better class, and two maids in a
class still better; it is only when you reach people of very decided form
that you find a man in a black coat behind your chair; Mrs. Makely,
mindful of the informality of her dinner in everything, had two men.

I should say the difference between the Altrurians and the unfashionable
Americans, in view of such a dinner as she gave us, would be that, while
it would seem to us abominable for its extravagance, and revolting in its
appeals to appetite, it would seem to most of such Americans altogether
admirable and enviable, and would appeal to their ambition to give such a
dinner themselves as soon as ever they could.

Well, with our oysters we had a delicate French wine, though I am told
that formerly Spanish wines were served. A delicious soup followed the
oysters, and then we had fish with sliced cucumbers dressed with oil and
vinegar, like a salad; and I suppose you will ask what we could possibly
have eaten more. But this was only the beginning, and next there came a
course of sweetbreads with green peas. With this the champagne began at
once to flow, for Mrs. Makely was nothing if not original, and she had
champagne very promptly. One of the gentlemen praised her for it, and
said you could not have it too soon, and he had secretly hoped it would
have begun with the oysters. Next, we had a remove--a tenderloin of beef,
with mushrooms, fresh, and not of the canned sort which it is usually
accompanied with. This fact won our hostess more compliments from the
gentlemen, which could not have gratified her more if she had dressed and
cooked the dish herself. She insisted upon our trying the stewed
terrapin, for, if it did come in a little by the neck and shoulders, it
was still in place at a Thanksgiving dinner, because it was so American;
and the stuffed peppers, which, if they were not American, were at least
Mexican, and originated in the kitchen of a sister republic. There were
one or two other side-dishes, and, with all, the burgundy began to be
poured out.

Mr. Makely said that claret all came now from California, no matter what
French château they named it after, but burgundy you could not err in.
His guests were now drinking the different wines, and to much the same
effect, I should think, as if they had mixed them all in one cup; though
I ought to say that several of the ladies took no wine, and kept me in
countenance after the first taste I was obliged to take of each, in order
to pacify my host.

You must know that all the time there were plates of radishes, olives,
celery, and roasted almonds set about that every one ate of without much
reference to the courses. The talking and the feasting were at their
height, but there was a little flagging of the appetite, perhaps, when it
received the stimulus of a water-ice flavored with rum. After eating it I
immediately experienced an extraordinary revival of my hunger (I am
ashamed to confess that I was gorging myself like the rest), but I
quailed inwardly when one of the men-servants set down before Mr. Makely
a roast turkey that looked as large as an ostrich. It was received with
cries of joy, and one of the gentlemen said, “Ah, Mrs. Makely, I was
waiting to see how you would interpolate the turkey, but you never fail.
I knew you would get it in somewhere. But where,” he added, in a
burlesque whisper, behind his hand, “are the--”

“Canvasback duck?” she asked, and at that moment the servant set before
the anxious inquirer a platter of these renowned birds, which you know
something of already from the report our emissaries have given of their
cult among the Americans.

Every one laughed, and after the gentleman had made a despairing flourish
over them with a carving-knife in emulation of Mr. Makely's emblematic
attempt upon the turkey, both were taken away and carved at a sideboard.
They were then served in slices, the turkey with cranberry sauce, and the
ducks with currant jelly; and I noticed that no one took so much of the
turkey that he could not suffer himself to be helped also to the duck. I
must tell you that there a salad with the duck, and after that there was
an ice-cream, with fruit and all manner of candied fruits, and candies,
different kinds of cheese, coffee, and liqueurs to drink after the
coffee.

“Well, now,” Mrs. Makely proclaimed, in high delight with her triumph, “I
must let you imagine the pumpkin-pie. I meant to have it, because it
isn't really Thanksgiving without it. But I couldn't, for the life of me,
see where it would come in.”




XV


The sally of the hostess made them all laugh, and they began to talk
about the genuine American character of the holiday, and what a fine
thing it was to have something truly national. They praised Mrs. Makely
for thinking of so many American dishes, and the facetious gentleman said
that she rendered no greater tribute than was due to the overruling
Providence which had so abundantly bestowed them upon the Americans as a
people. “You must have been glad, Mrs. Strange,” he said to the lady at
my side, “to get back to our American oysters. There seems nothing else
so potent to bring us home from Europe.”

“I'm afraid,” she answered, “that I don't care so much for the American
oyster as I should. But I am certainly glad to get back.”

“In time for the turkey, perhaps?”

“No, I care no more for the turkey than for the oyster of my native
land,” said the lady.

“Ah, well, say the canvasback duck, then? The canvasback duck is no
alien. He is as thoroughly American as the turkey, or as any of us.”

“No, I should not have missed him, either,” persisted the lady.

“What could one have missed,” the gentleman said, with a bow to the
hostess, “in the dinner Mrs. Makely has given us? If there had been
nothing, I should not have missed it,” and when the laugh at his drolling
had subsided he asked Mrs. Strange: “Then, if it is not too indiscreet,
might I inquire what in the world has lured you again to our shores, if
it was not the oyster, nor the turkey, nor yet the canvasback?”

“The American dinner-party,” said the lady, with the same burlesque.

“Well,” he consented, “I think I understand you. It is different from the
English dinner-party in being a festivity rather than a solemnity;
though, after all, the American dinner is only a condition of the English
dinner. Do you find us much changed, Mrs. Strange?”

“I think we are every year a little more European,” said the lady. “One
notices it on getting home.”

“I supposed we were so European already,” returned the gentleman, “that
a European landing among us would think he had got back to his
starting-point in a sort of vicious circle. I am myself so thoroughly
Europeanized in all my feelings and instincts that, do you know, Mrs.
Makely, if I may confess it without offence--”

“Oh, by all means!” cried the hostess.

“When that vast bird which we have been praising, that colossal roast
turkey, appeared, I felt a shudder go through my delicate substance, such
as a refined Englishman might have experienced at the sight, and I said
to myself, quite as if I were not one of you, 'Good Heavens! now they
will begin talking through their noses and eating with their knives.'
It's what I might have expected!”

It was impossible not to feel that this gentleman was talking at me; if
the Americans have a foreign guest, they always talk at him more or less;
and I was not surprised when he said, “I think our friend, Mr. Homos,
will conceive my fine revolt from the crude period of our existence which
the roast turkey marks as distinctly as the graffiti of the cave-dweller
proclaim his epoch.”

“No,” I protested, “I am afraid that I have not the documents for the
interpretation of your emotion. I hope you will take pity on my ignorance
and tell me just what you mean.”

The others said they none of them knew, either, and would like to know,
and the gentleman began by saying that he had been going over the matter
in his mind on his way to dinner, and he had really been trying to lead
up to it ever since we sat down. “I've been struck, first of all, by the
fact, in our evolution, that we haven't socially evolved from ourselves;
we've evolved from the Europeans, from the English. I don't think you'll
find a single society rite with us now that had its origin in our
peculiar national life, if we have a peculiar national life; I doubt it,
sometimes. If you begin with the earliest thing in the day, if you begin
with breakfast, as society gives breakfasts, you have an English
breakfast, though American people and provisions.”

“I must say, I think they're both much nicer,” said Mrs. Makely.

“Ah, there I am with you! We borrow the form, but we infuse the spirit. I
am talking about the form, though. Then, if you come to the society
lunch, which is almost indistinguishable from the society breakfast, you
have the English lunch, which is really an undersized English dinner.
The afternoon tea is English again, with its troops of eager females and
stray, reluctant males; though I believe there are rather more men at the
English teas, owing to the larger leisure class in England. The afternoon
tea and the 'at home' are as nearly alike as the breakfast and the lunch.
Then, in the course of time, we arrive at the great society function,
the dinner; and what is the dinner with us but the dinner of our
mother-country?”

“It is livelier,” suggested Mrs. Makely, again.

“Livelier, I grant you, but I am still speaking of the form, and not of
the spirit. The evening reception, which is gradually fading away, as a
separate rite, with its supper and its dance, we now have as the English
have it, for the people who have not been asked to dinner. The ball,
which brings us round to breakfast again, is again the ball of our
Anglo-Saxon kin beyond the seas. In short, from the society point of view
we are in everything their mere rinsings.”

“Nothing of the kind!” cried Mrs. Makely. “I won't let you say such a
thing! On Thanksgiving-day, too! Why, there is the Thanksgiving dinner
itself! If that isn't purely American, I should like to know what is.”

“It is purely American, but it is strictly domestic; it is not society.
Nobody but some great soul like you, Mrs. Makely, would have the courage
to ask anybody to a Thanksgiving dinner, and even you ask only such
easy-going house-friends as we are proud to be. You wouldn't think of
giving a dinner-party on Thanksgiving?”

“No, I certainly shouldn't. I should think it was very presuming; and you
are all as nice as you can be to have come to-day; I am not the only
great soul at the table. But that is neither here nor there. Thanksgiving
is a purely American thing, and it's more popular than ever. A few years
ago you never heard of it outside of New England.”

The gentleman laughed. “You are perfectly right, Mrs. Makely, as you
always are. Thanksgiving is purely American. So is the corn-husking, so
is the apple-bee, so is the sugar-party, so is the spelling-match, so is
the church-sociable; but none of these have had their evolution in our
society entertainments. The New Year's call was also purely American, but
that is now as extinct as the dodo, though I believe the other American
festivities are still known in the rural districts.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Makely, “and I think it's a great shame that we can't
have some of them in a refined form in society. I once went to a
sugar-party up in New Hampshire when I was a girl, and I never enjoyed
myself so much in my life. I should like to make up a party to go to one
somewhere in the Catskills in March. Will you all go? It would be
something to show Mr. Homos. I should like to show him something really
American before he goes home. There's nothing American left in society!”

“You forget the American woman,” suggested the gentleman. “She is always
American, and she is always in society.”

“Yes,” returned our hostess, with a thoughtful air, “you're quite right
in that. One always meets more women than men in society. But it's
because the men are so lazy, and so comfortable at their clubs, they
won't go. They enjoy themselves well enough in society after they get
there, as I tell my husband when he grumbles over having to dress.”

“Well,” said the gentleman, “a great many things, the day-time things, we
really can't come to, because we don't belong to the aristocratic class,
as you ladies do, and we are busy down-town. But I don't think we are
reluctant about dinner; and the young fellows are nearly always willing
to go to a ball, if the supper's good and it's a house where they don't
feel obliged to dance. But what do _you_ think, Mr. Homos?” he
asked. “How does your observation coincide with my experience?”

I answered that I hardly felt myself qualified to speak, for though I had
assisted at the different kinds of society rites he had mentioned, thanks
to the hospitality of my friends in New York, I knew the English
functions only from a very brief stay in England on my way here, and from
what I had read of them in English fiction and in the relations of our
emissaries. He inquired into our emissary system, and the company
appeared greatly interested in such account of it as I could briefly
give.

“Well,” he said, “that would do while you kept it to yourselves; but now
that your country is known to the plutocratic world, your public
documents will be apt to come back to the countries your emissaries have
visited, and make trouble. The first thing you know some of our bright
reporters will get on to one of your emissaries, and interview him, and
then we shall get what you think of us at first hands. By-the-by, have
you seen any of those primitive social delights which Mrs. Makely regrets
so much?”

“I!” our hostess protested. But then she perceived that he was joking,
and she let me answer.

I said that I had seen them nearly all, during the past year, in New
England and in the West, but they appeared to me inalienable of the
simpler life of the country, and that I was not surprised they should not
have found an evolution in the more artificial society of the cities.

“I see,” he returned, “that you reserve your _opinion_ of our more
artificial society; but you may be sure that our reporters will get it
out of you yet before you leave us.”

“Those horrid reporters!” one of the ladies irrelevantly sighed.

The gentleman resumed: “In the mean time, I don't mind saying how it
strikes me. I think you are quite right about the indigenous American
things being adapted only to the simpler life of the country and the
smaller towns. It is so everywhere. As soon as people become at all
refined they look down upon what is their own as something vulgar. But it
is peculiarly so with us. We have nothing national that is not connected
with the life of work, and when we begin to live the life of pleasure we
must borrow from the people abroad, who have always lived the life of
pleasure.”

“Mr. Homos, you know,” Mrs. Makely explained for me, as if this were the
aptest moment, “thinks we all ought to work. He thinks we oughtn't to
have any servants.”

“Oh no, my dear lady,” I put in. “I don't think that of you as you
_are_. None of you could see more plainly than I do that in your
conditions you _must_ have servants, and that you cannot possibly
work unless poverty obliges you.”

The other ladies had turned upon me with surprise and horror at Mrs.
Makely's words, but they now apparently relented, as if I had fully
redeemed myself from the charge made against me. Mrs. Strange alone
seemed to have found nothing monstrous in my supposed position.
“Sometimes,” she said, “I wish we had to work, all of us, and that we
could be freed from our servile bondage to servants.”

Several of the ladies admitted that it was the greatest slavery in the
world, and that it would be comparative luxury to do one's own work. But
they all asked, in one form or another, what were they to do, and Mrs.
Strange owned that she did not know. The facetious gentleman asked me how
the ladies did in Altruria, and when I told them, as well as I could,
they were, of course, very civil about it, but I could see that they all
thought it impossible, or, if not impossible, then ridiculous. I did not
feel bound to defend our customs, and I knew very well that each woman
there was imagining herself in our conditions with the curse of her
plutocratic tradition still upon her. They could not do otherwise, any of
them, and they seemed to get tired of such effort as they did make.

Mrs. Makely rose, and the other ladies rose with her, for the Americans
follow the English custom in letting the men remain at table after the
women have left. But on this occasion I found it varied by a pretty touch
from the French custom, and the men, instead of merely standing up while
the women filed out, gave each his arm, as far as the drawing-room, to
the lady he had brought in to dinner. Then we went back, and what is the
pleasantest part of the dinner to most men began for us.




XVI


I must say, to the credit of the Americans, that although the eating and
drinking among them appear gross enough to an Altrurian, you are not
revolted by the coarse stories which the English sometimes tell as soon
as the ladies have left them. If it is a men's dinner, or more especially
a men's supper, these stories are pretty sure to follow the coffee; but
when there have been women at the board, some sense of their presence
seems to linger in the more delicate American nerves, and the indulgence
is limited to two or three things off color, as the phrase is here, told
with anxious glances at the drawing-room doors, to see if they are fast
shut.

I do not remember just what brought the talk back from these primrose
paths to that question of American society forms, but presently some one
said he believed the church-sociable was the thing in most towns beyond
the apple-bee and sugar-party stage, and this opened the inquiry as to
how far the church still formed the social life of the people in cities.
Some one suggested that in Brooklyn it formed it altogether, and then
they laughed, for Brooklyn is always a joke with the New-Yorkers; I do
not know exactly why, except that this vast city is so largely a suburb,
and that it has a great number of churches and is comparatively cheap.
Then another told of a lady who had come to New York (he admitted, twenty
years ago), and was very lonely, as she had no letters until she joined a
church. This at once brought her a general acquaintance, and she began to
find herself in society; but as soon as she did so she joined a more
exclusive church, where they took no notice of strangers. They all
laughed at that bit of human nature, as they called it, and they
philosophized the relation of women to society as a purely business
relation. The talk ranged to the mutable character of society, and how
people got into it, or were of it, and how it was very different from
what it once was, except that with women it was always business. They
spoke of certain new rich people with affected contempt; but I could see
that they were each proud of knowing such millionaires as they could
claim for acquaintance, though they pretended to make fun of the number
of men-servants you had to run the gantlet of in their houses before you
could get to your hostess.

One of my commensals said he had noticed that I took little or no wine,
and, when I said that we seldom drank it in Altruria, he answered that he
did not think I could make that go in America, if I meant to dine much.
“Dining, you know, means overeating,” he explained, “and if you wish to
overeat you must overdrink. I venture to say that you will pass a worse
night than any of us, Mr. Homos, and that you will be sorrier to-morrow
than I shall.” They were all smoking, and I confess that their tobacco
was secretly such an affliction to me that I was at one moment in doubt
whether I should take a cigar myself or ask leave to join the ladies.

The gentleman who had talked so much already said: “Well, I don't mind
dining, a great deal, especially with Makely, here, but I do object to
supping, as I have to do now and then, in the way of pleasure. Last
Saturday night I sat down at eleven o'clock to blue-point oysters,
consommé, stewed terrapin--yours was very good, Makely; I wish I had
taken more of it--lamb chops with peas, redhead duck with celery
mayonnaise, Nesselrode pudding, fruit, cheese, and coffee, with sausages,
caviare, radishes, celery, and olives interspersed wildly, and drinkables
and smokables _ad libitum_; and I can assure you that I felt very
devout when I woke up after church-time in the morning. It is this
turning night into day that is killing us. We men, who have to go to
business the next morning, ought to strike, and say that we won't go
to anything later than eight-o'clock dinner.”

“Ah, then the women would insist upon our making it four-o'clock tea,”
 said another.

Our host seemed to be reminded of something by the mention of the women,
and he said, after a glance at the state of the cigars, “Shall we join
the ladies?”

One of the men-servants had evidently been waiting for this question. He
held the door open, and we all filed into the drawing-room.

Mrs. Makely hailed me with, “Ah, Mr. Homos, I'm so glad you've come! We
poor women have been having a most dismal time!”

“Honestly,” asked the funny gentleman, “don't you always, without us?”
 “Yes, but this has been worse than usual. Mrs. Strange has been asking us
how many people we supposed there were in this city, within five minutes'
walk of us, who had no dinner to-day. Do you call that kind?”

“A little more than kin and less than kind, perhaps,” the gentleman
suggested. “But what does she propose to do about it?”

He turned towards Mrs. Strange, who answered, “Nothing. What does any one
propose to do about it?”

“Then, why do you think about it?”

“I don't. It thinks about itself. Do you know that poem of Longfellow's,
'The Challenge'?”

“No, I never heard of it.”

“Well, it begins in his sweet old way, about some Spanish king who was
killed before a city he was besieging, and one of his knights sallies out
of the camp and challenges the people of the city, the living and the
dead, as traitors. Then the poet breaks off, _apropos de rien:_

     'There is a greater army
       That besets us round with strife,
     A numberless, starving army,
       At all the gates of life.
     The poverty-stricken millions
       Who challenge our wine and bread
     And impeach us all for traitors,
       Both the living and the dead.
     And whenever I sit at the banquet,
       Where the feast and song are high,
     Amid the mirth and the music
       I can hear that fearful cry.

     And hollow and haggard faces
       Look into the lighted hall,
     And wasted hands are extended
       To catch the crumbs that fall.
     For within there is light and plenty,
       And odors fill the air;
     But without there is cold and darkness,
       And hunger and despair.
     And there, in the camp of famine,
       In wind and cold and rain,
     Christ, the great Lord of the Army,
       Lies dead upon the plain.'”


“Ah,” said the facetious gentleman, “that is fine! We really forget how
fine Longfellow was. It is so pleasant to hear you quoting poetry, Mrs.
Strange! That sort of thing has almost gone out; and it's a pity.”




XVII


Our fashion of offering hospitality on the impulse would be as strange
here as offering it without some special inducement for its acceptance.
The inducement is, as often as can be, a celebrity or eccentricity of
some sort, or some visiting foreigner; and I suppose that I have been a
good deal used myself in one quality or the other. But when the thing has
been done, fully and guardedly at all points, it does not seem to have
been done for pleasure, either by the host or the guest. The dinner is
given in payment of another dinner; or out of ambition by people who are
striving to get forward in society; or by great social figures who give
regularly a certain number of dinners every season. In either case it is
eaten from motives at once impersonal and selfish. I do not mean to say
that I have not been at many dinners where I felt nothing perfunctory
either in host or guest, and where as sweet and gay a spirit ruled as at
any of our own simple feasts. Still, I think our main impression of
American hospitality would be that it was thoroughly infused with the
plutocratic principle, and that it meant business.

I am speaking now of the hospitality of society people, who number, after
all, but a few thousands out of the many millions of American people.
These millions are so far from being in society, even when they are very
comfortable, and on the way to great prosperity, if they are not already
greatly prosperous, that if they were suddenly confronted with the best
society of the great Eastern cities they would find it almost as strange
as so many Altrurians. A great part of them have no conception of
entertaining except upon an Altrurian scale of simplicity, and they know
nothing and care less for the forms that society people value themselves
upon. When they begin, in the ascent of the social scale, to adopt forms,
it is still to wear them lightly and with an individual freedom and
indifference; it is long before anxiety concerning the social law renders
them vulgar.

Yet from highest to lowest, from first to last, one invariable fact
characterizes them all, and it may be laid down as an axiom that in a
plutocracy the man who needs a dinner is the man who is never asked to
dine. I do not say that he is not given a dinner. He is very often given
a dinner, and for the most part he is kept from starving to death; but he
is not suffered to sit at meat with his host, if the person who gives him
a meal can be called his host. His need of the meal stamps him with a
hopeless inferiority, and relegates him morally to the company of the
swine at their husks, and of Lazarus, whose sores the dogs licked.
Usually, of course, he is not physically of such a presence as to fit him
for any place in good society short of Abraham's bosom; but even if he
were entirely decent, or of an inoffensive shabbiness, it would not be
possible for his benefactors, in any grade of society, to ask him to
their tables. He is sometimes fed in the kitchen; where the people of the
house feed in the kitchen themselves, he is fed at the back door.

We were talking of this the other night at the house of that lady whom
Mrs. Makely invited me specially to meet on Thanksgiving-day. It happened
then, as it often happens here, that although I was asked to meet her, I
saw very little of her. It was not so bad as it sometimes is, for I have
been asked to meet people, very informally, and passed the whole evening
with them, and yet not exchanged a word with them. Mrs. Makely really
gave me a seat next Mrs. Strange at table, and we had some unimportant
conversation; but there was a lively little creature vis-à-vis of me, who
had a fancy of addressing me so much of her talk that my acquaintance
with. Mrs. Strange rather languished through the dinner, and she went
away so soon after the men rejoined the ladies in the drawing-room that I
did not speak to her there. I was rather surprised, then, to receive a
note from her a few days later, asking me to dinner; and I finally went,
I am ashamed to own, more from curiosity than from any other motive. I
had been, in the mean time, thoroughly coached concerning her by Mrs.
Makely, whom I told of my invitation, and who said, quite frankly, that
she wished Mrs. Strange had asked her, too. “But Eveleth Strange wouldn't
do that,” she explained, “because it would have the effect of paying me
back. I'm so glad, on your account, that you're going, for I do want you
to know at least one American woman that you can unreservedly approve of;
I know you don't _begin_ to approve of _me;_ and I was so vexed
that you really had no chance to talk with her that night you met her
here; it seemed to me as if she ran away early just to provoke me; and,
to tell you the truth, I thought she had taken a dislike to you. I wish I
could tell you just what sort of a person she is, but it would be
perfectly hopeless, for you haven't got the documents, and you never
could get them. I used to be at school with her, and even then she wasn't
like any of the other girls. She was always so original, and did things
from such a high motive, that afterwards, when we were all settled, I
was perfectly thunderstruck at her marrying old Bellington Strange, who
was twice her age and had nothing but his money; he was not related to
the New York Bellingtons at all, and nobody knows how he got the name;
nobody ever heard of the Stranges. In fact, people say that he used to be
plain Peter B. Strange till he married Eveleth, and she made him drop the
Peter and blossom out in the Bellington, so that he could seem to have a
social as well as a financial history. People who dislike her insisted
that they were not in the least surprised at her marrying him; that the
high-motive business was just her pose; and that she had jumped at the
chance of getting him. But I always stuck up for her--and I know that she
did it for the sake of her family, who were all as poor as poor, and were
dependent on her after her father went to smash in his business. She was
always as high-strung and romantic as she could be, but I don't believe
that even then she would have taken Mr. Strange if there had been anybody
else. I don't suppose any one else ever looked at her, for the young men
are pretty sharp nowadays, and are not going to marry girls without a
cent, when there are so many rich girls, just as charming every way; you
can't expect them to. At any rate, whatever her motive was, she had her
reward, for Mr. Strange died within a year of their marriage, and she got
all his money. There was no attempt to break the will, for Mr. Strange
seemed to be literally of no family; and she's lived quietly on in the
house he bought her ever since, except when she's in Europe, and that's
about two-thirds of the time. She has her mother with her, and I suppose
that her sisters and her cousins and her aunts come in for outdoor aid.
She's always helping somebody. They say that's her pose, now; but, if it
is, I don't think it's a bad one; and certainly, if she wanted to get
married again, there would be no trouble, with her three millions. I
advise you to go to her dinner, by all means, Mr. Homos. It will be
something worth while, in every way, and perhaps you'll convert her to
Altrurianism; she's as hopeful a subject as _I_ know.”




XVIII


I was one of the earliest of the guests, for I cannot yet believe that
people do not want me to come exactly when they say they do. I perceived,
however, that one other gentleman had come before me, and I was both
surprised and delighted to find that this was my acquaintance Mr.
Bullion, the Boston banker. He professed as much pleasure at our meeting
as I certainly felt; but after a few words he went on talking with Mrs.
Strange, while I was left to her mother, an elderly woman of quiet and
even timid bearing, who affected me at once as born and bred in a wholly
different environment. In fact, every American of the former generation
is almost as strange to it in tradition, though not in principle, as I
am; and I found myself singularly at home with this sweet lady, who
seemed glad of my interest in her. I was taken from her side to be
introduced to a lady, on the opposite side of the room, who said she had
been promised my acquaintance by a friend of hers, whom I had met in the
mountains--Mr. Twelvemough; did I remember him? She gave a little
cry while still speaking, and dramatically stretched her hand towards a
gentleman who entered at the moment, and whom I saw to be no other than
Mr. Twelvemough himself. As soon as he had greeted our hostess he
hastened up to us, and, barely giving himself time to press the still
outstretched hand of my companion, shook mine warmly, and expressed the
greatest joy at seeing me. He said that he had just got back to town, in
a manner, and had not known I was here, till Mrs. Strange had asked him
to meet me. There were not a great many other guests, when they all
arrived, and we sat down, a party not much larger than at Mrs. Makely's.

I found that I was again to take out my hostess, but I was put next the
lady with whom I had been talking; she had come without her husband, who
was, apparently, of a different social taste from herself, and had an
engagement of his own; there was an artist and his wife, whose looks I
liked; some others whom I need not specify were there, I fancied, because
they had heard of Altruria and were curious to see me. As Mr. Twelvemough
sat quite at the other end of the table, the lady on my right could
easily ask me whether I liked his books. She said, tentatively, people
liked them because they felt sure when they took up one of his novels
they had not got hold of a tract on political economy in disguise.

It was this complimentary close of a remark, which scarcely began with
praise, that made itself heard across the table, and was echoed with a
heartfelt sigh from the lips of another lady.

“Yes,” she said, “that is what I find such a comfort in Mr. Twelvemough's
books.”

“We were speaking of Mr. Twelvemough's books,” the first lady triumphed,
and several began to extol them for being fiction pure and simple, and
not dealing with anything but loves of young people.

Mr. Twelvemough sat looking as modest as he could under the praise, and
one of the ladies said that in a novel she had lately read there was a
description of a surgical operation that made her feel as if she had
been present at a clinic. Then the author said that he had read that
passage, too, and found it extremely well done. It was fascinating, but
it was not art.

The painter asked, Why was it not art?

The author answered, Well, if such a thing as that was art, then anything
that a man chose to do in a work of imagination was art.

“Precisely,” said the painter--“art _is_ choice.”

“On that ground,” the banker interposed, “you could say that political
economy was a fit subject for art, if an artist chose to treat it.”

“It would have its difficulties,” the painter admitted, “but there
are certain phases of political economy, dramatic moments, human
moments, which might be very fitly treated in art. For instance, who
would object to Mr. Twelvemough's describing an eviction from an East
Side tenement-house on a cold winter night, with the mother and her
children huddled about the fire the father had kindled with pieces of the
household furniture?”

“_I_ should object very much, for one,” said the lady who had
objected to the account of the surgical operation. “It would be too
creepy. Art should give pleasure.”

“Then you think a tragedy is not art?” asked the painter.

“I think that these harrowing subjects are brought in altogether too
much,” said the lady. “There are enough of them in real life, without
filling all the novels with them. It's terrible the number of beggars
you meet on the street, this winter. Do you want to meet them in Mr.
Twelvemough's novels, too?”

“Well, it wouldn't cost me any money there. I shouldn't have to give.”

“You oughtn't to give money in real life,” said the lady. “You ought to
give charity tickets. If the beggars refuse them, it shows they are
impostors.”

“It's some comfort to know that the charities are so active,” said the
elderly young lady, “even if half the letters one gets _do_ turn out
to be appeals from them.”

“It's very disappointing to have them do it, though,” said the artist,
lightly. “I thought there was a society to abolish poverty. That doesn't
seem to be so active as the charities this winter. Is it possible they've
found it a failure?”

“Well,” said Mr. Bullion, “perhaps they have suspended during the hard
times.”

They tossed the ball back and forth with a lightness the Americans have,
and I could not have believed, if I had not known how hardened people
become to such things here, that they were almost in the actual presence
of hunger and cold. It was within five minutes' walk of their warmth and
surfeit; and if they had lifted the window and called, “Who goes there?”
 the houselessness that prowls the night could have answered them from the
street below, “Despair!”

“I had an amusing experience,” Mr. Twelvemough began, “when I was doing a
little visiting for the charities in our ward, the other winter.”

“For the sake of the literary material?” the artist suggested.

“Partly for the sake of the literary material; you know we have to look
for our own everywhere. But we had a case of an old actor's son, who had
got out of all the places he had filled, on account of rheumatism, and
could not go to sea, or drive a truck, or even wrap gas-fixtures in paper
any more.”

“A checkered employ,” the banker mused aloud.

“It was not of a simultaneous nature,” the novelist explained. “So he
came on the charities, and, as I knew the theatrical profession a little,
and how generous it was with all related to it, I said that I would
undertake to look after his case. You know the theory is that we get work
for our patients, or clients, or whatever they are, and I went to a
manager whom I knew to be a good fellow, and I asked him for some sort of
work. He said, Yes, send the man round, and he would give him a job
copying parts for a new play he had written.”

The novelist paused, and nobody laughed.

“It seems to me that your experience is instructive, rather than
amusing,” said the banker. “It shows that something can be done, if you
try.”

“Well,” said Mr. Twelvemough, “I thought that was the moral, myself, till
the fellow came afterwards to thank me. He said that he considered
himself very lucky, for the manager had told him that there were six
other men had wanted that job.”

Everybody laughed now, and I looked at my hostess in a little
bewilderment. She murmured, “I suppose the joke is that he had befriended
one man at the expense of six others.”

“Oh,” I returned, “is that a joke?”

No one answered, but the lady at my right asked, “How do you manage with
poverty in Altruria?”

I saw the banker fix a laughing eye on me, but I answered, “In Altruria
we have no poverty.”

“Ah, I knew you would say that!” he cried out. “That's what he always
does,” he explained to the lady. “Bring up any one of our little
difficulties, and ask how they get over it in Altruria, and he says they
have nothing like it. It's very simple.”

They all began to ask me questions, but with a courteous incredulity
which I could feel well enough, and some of my answers made them laugh,
all but my hostess, who received them with a gravity that finally
prevailed. But I was not disposed to go on talking of Altruria then,
though they all protested a real interest, and murmured against the
hardship of being cut off with so brief an account of our country as I
had given them.

“Well,” said the banker at last, “if there is no cure for our poverty, we
might as well go on and enjoy ourselves.”

“Yes,” said our hostess, with a sad little smile, “we might as well enjoy
ourselves.”




XIX


The talk at Mrs. Strange's table took a far wider range than my meagre
notes would intimate, and we sat so long that it was almost eleven
before the men joined the ladies in the drawing-room. You will hardly
conceive of remaining two, three, or four hours at dinner, as one often
does here, in society; out of society the meals are despatched with a
rapidity unknown to the Altrurians. Our habit of listening to lectors,
especially at the evening repast, and then of reasoning upon what we
have heard, prolongs our stay at the board; but the fondest listener,
the greatest talker among us, would be impatient of the delay eked out
here by the great number and the slow procession of the courses served.
Yet the poorest American would find his ideal realized rather in the
long-drawn-out gluttony of the society dinner here than in our temperate
simplicity.

At such a dinner it is very hard to avoid a surfeit, and I have to guard
myself very carefully, lest, in the excitement of the talk, I gorge
myself with everything, in its turn. Even at the best, my overloaded
stomach often joins with my conscience in reproaching me for what you
would think a shameful excess at table. Yet, wicked as my riot is, my
waste is worse, and I have to think, with contrition, not only of what I
have eaten, but of what I have left uneaten, in a city where so many
wake and sleep in hunger.

The ladies made a show of lingering after we joined them in the
drawing-room; but there were furtive glances at the clock, and presently
her guests began to bid Mrs. Strange good-night. When I came up and
offered her my hand, she would not take it, but murmured, with a kind of
passion: “Don't go! I mean it! Stay, and tell us about Altruria--my
mother and me!”

I was by no means loath, for I must confess that all I had seen and heard
of this lady interested me in her more and more. I felt at home with her,
too, as with no other society woman I have met; she seemed to me not only
good, but very sincere, and very good-hearted, in spite of the world she
lived in. Yet I have met so many disappointments here, of the kind that
our civilization wholly fails to prepare us for, that I should not have
been surprised to find that Mrs. Strange had wished me to stay, not that
she might hear me talk about Altruria, but that I might hear her talk
about herself. You must understand that the essential vice of a system
which concentres a human being's thoughts upon his own interests, from
the first moment of responsibility, colors and qualifies every motive
with egotism. All egotists are unconscious, for otherwise they would be
intolerable to themselves; but some are subtler than others; and as most
women have finer natures than most men everywhere, and in America most
women have finer minds than most men, their egotism usually takes the
form of pose. This is usually obvious, but in some cases it is so
delicately managed that you do not suspect it, unless some other woman
gives you a hint of it, and even then you cannot be sure of it, seeing
the self-sacrifice, almost to martyrdom, which the _poseuse_ makes
for it. If Mrs. Makely had not suggested that some people attributed
a pose to Mrs. Strange, I should certainly never have dreamed of looking
for it, and I should have been only intensely interested, when she began,
as soon as I was left alone with her and her mother:

“You may not know how unusual I am in asking this favor of you, Mr.
Homos; but you might as well learn from me as from others that I am
rather unusual in everything. In fact, you can report in Altruria, when
you get home, that you found at least one woman in America whom fortune
had smiled upon in every way, and who hated her smiling fortune almost
as much as she hated herself. I'm quite satisfied,” she went on, with a
sad mockery, “that fortune is a man, and an American; when he has given
you all the materials for having a good time, he believes that you must
be happy, because there is nothing to hinder. It isn't that I want to be
happy in the greedy way that men think we do, for then I could easily be
happy. If you have a soul which is not above buttons, buttons are enough.
But if you expect to be of real use, to help on, and to help out, you
will be disappointed. I have not the faith that they say upholds you
Altrurians in trying to help out, if I don't see my way out. It seems to
me that my reason has some right to satisfaction, and that, if I am a
woman grown, I can't be satisfied with the assurances they would give
to little girls--that everything is going on well. Any one can see that
things are not going on well. There is more and more wretchedness of
every kind, not hunger of body alone, but hunger of soul. If you escape
one, you suffer the other, because, if you _have_ a soul, you must
long to help, not for a time, but for all time. I suppose,” she asked,
abruptly, “that Mrs. Makely has told you something about me?”

“Something,” I admitted.

“I ask,” she went on, “because I don't want to bore you with a statement
of my case, if you know it already. Ever since I heard you were in New
York I have wished to see you, and to talk with you about Altruria; I did
not suppose that there would be any chance at Mrs. Makely's, and there
wasn't; and I did not suppose there would be any chance here, unless I
could take courage to do what I have done now. You must excuse it, if it
seems as extraordinary a proceeding to you as it really is; I wouldn't at
all have you think it is usual for a lady to ask one of her guests to
stay after the rest, in order, if you please, to confess herself to him.
It's a crime without a name.”

She laughed, not gayly, but humorously, and then went on, speaking always
with a feverish eagerness which I find it hard to give you a sense of,
for the women here have an intensity quite beyond our experience of the
sex at home.

“But you are a foreigner, and you come from an order of things so utterly
unlike ours that perhaps you will be able to condone my offence. At any
rate, I have risked it.” She laughed again, more gayly, and recovered
herself in a cheerfuller and easier mood. “Well, the long and the short
of it is that I have come to the end of my tether. I have tried, as truly
as I believe any woman ever did, to do my share, with money and with
work, to help make life better for those whose life is bad; and though
one mustn't boast of good works, I may say that I have been pretty
thorough, and, if I've given up, it's because I see, in our state of
things, _no_ hope of curing the evil. It's like trying to soak up
the drops of a rainstorm. You do dry up a drop here and there; but the
clouds are full of them, and, the first thing you know, you stand, with
your blotting-paper in your hand, in a puddle over your shoe-tops. There
is nothing but charity, and charity is a failure, except for the moment.
If you think of the misery around you, that must remain around you for
ever and ever, as long as you live, you have your choice--to go mad and
be put into an asylum, or go mad and devote yourself to society.”




XX

While Mrs. Strange talked on, her mother listened quietly, with a dim,
submissive smile and her hands placidly crossed in her lap. She now said:
“It seems to be very different now from what it was in my time. There are
certainly a great many beggars, and we used never to have one. Children
grew up, and people lived and died, in large towns, without ever seeing
one. I remember, when my husband first took me abroad, how astonished we
were at the beggars. Now I meet as many in New York as I met in London or
in Rome. But if you don't do charity, what can you do? Christ enjoined
it, and Paul says--”

“Oh, people _never_ do the charity that Christ meant,” said Mrs.
Strange; “and, as things are now, how _could_ they? Who would dream
of dividing half her frocks and wraps with poor women, or selling
_all_ and giving to the poor? That is what makes it so hopeless. We
_know_ that Christ was perfectly right, and that He was perfectly
sincere in what He said to the good young millionaire; but we all go away
exceeding sorrowful, just as the good young millionaire did. We have to,
if we don't want to come on charity ourselves. How do _you_ manage
about that?” she asked me; and then she added, “But, of course, I forgot
that you have no need of charity.”

“Oh yes, we have,” I returned; and I tried, once more, as I have tried so
often with Americans, to explain how the heavenly need of giving the self
continues with us, but on terms that do not harrow the conscience of the
giver, as self-sacrifice always must here, at its purest and noblest. I
sought to make her conceive of our nation as a family, where every one
was secured against want by the common provision, and against the
degrading and depraving inequality which comes from want. The “dead-level
of equality” is what the Americans call the condition in which all would
be as the angels of God, and they blasphemously deny that He ever meant
His creatures to be alike happy, because some, through a long succession
of unfair advantages, have inherited more brain or brawn or beauty than
others. I found that this gross and impious notion of God darkened even
the clear intelligence of a woman like Mrs. Strange; and, indeed, it
prevails here so commonly that it is one of the first things advanced as
an argument against the Altrurianization of America.

I believe I did, at last, succeed in showing her how charity still
continues among us, but in forms that bring neither a sense of
inferiority to him who takes nor anxiety to him who gives. I said that
benevolence here often seemed to involve, essentially, some such risk as
a man should run if he parted with a portion of the vital air which
belonged to himself and his family, in succoring a fellow-being from
suffocation; but that with us, where it was no more possible for one to
deprive himself of his share of the common food, shelter, and clothing,
than of the air he breathed, one could devote one's self utterly to
others without that foul alloy of fear which I thought must basely
qualify every good deed in plutocratic conditions.

She said that she knew what I meant, and that I was quite right in my
conjecture, as regarded men, at least; a man who did not stop to think
what the effect, upon himself and his own, his giving must have, would be
a fool or a madman; but women could often give as recklessly as they
spent, without any thought of consequences, for they did not know how
money came.

“Women,” I said, “are exterior to your conditions, and they can sacrifice
themselves without wronging any one.”

“Or, rather,” she continued, “without the sense of wronging any one. Our
men like to keep us in that innocence or ignorance; they think it is
pretty, or they think it is funny; and as long as a girl is in her
father's house, or a wife is in her husband's, she knows no more of
money-earning or money-making than a child. Most grown women among us,
if they had a sum of money in the bank, would not know how to get it
out. They would not know how to indorse a check, much less draw one. But
there are plenty of women who are inside the conditions, as much as men
are--poor women who have to earn their bread, and rich-women who have to
manage their property. I can't speak for the poor women; but I can speak
for the rich, and I can confess for them that what you imagine is true.
The taint of unfaith and distrust is on every dollar that you dole out,
so that, as far as the charity of the rich is concerned, I would read
Shakespeare:

'It curseth him that gives, and him that takes.'”

“Perhaps that is why the rich give comparatively so little. The poor can
never understand how much the rich value their money, how much the owner
of a great fortune dreads to see it less. If it were not so, they would
surely give more than they do; for a man who has ten millions could give
eight of them without feeling the loss; the man with a hundred could give
ninety and be no nearer want. Ah, it's a strange mystery! My poor husband
and I used to talk of it a great deal, in the long year that he lay
dying; and I think I hate my superfluity the more because I know he hated
it so much.”

A little trouble had stolen into her impassioned tones, and there was a
gleam, as of tears, in the eyes she dropped for a moment. They were
shining still when she lifted them again to mine.

“I suppose,” she said, “that Mrs. Makely told you something of my
marriage?”

“Eveleth!” her mother protested, with a gentle murmur.

“Oh, I think I can be frank with Mr. Homos. He is not an American, and he
will understand, or, at least, he will not misunderstand. Besides, I dare
say I shall not say anything worse than Mrs. Makely has said already. My
husband was much older than I, and I ought not to have married him; a
young girl ought never to marry an old man, or even a man who is only
a good many years her senior. But we both faithfully tried to make the
best of our mistake, not the worst, and I think this effort helped us to
respect each other, when there couldn't be any question of more. He was
a rich man, and he had made his money out of nothing, or, at least, from
a beginning of utter poverty. But in his last years he came to a sense of
its worthlessness, such as few men who have made their money ever have.
He was a common man, in a great many ways; he was imperfectly educated,
and he was ungrammatical, and he never was at home in society; but he had
a tender heart and an honest nature, and I revere his memory, as no one
would believe I could without knowing him as I did. His money became a
burden and a terror to him; he did not know what to do with it, and he
was always morbidly afraid of doing harm with it; he got to thinking that
money was an evil in itself.”

“That is what we think,” I ventured.

“Yes, I know. But he had thought this out for himself, and yet he had
times when his thinking about it seemed to him a kind of craze, and, at
any rate, he distrusted himself so much that he died leaving it all
to me. I suppose he thought that perhaps I could learn how to give it
without hurting; and then he knew that, in our state of things, I must
have some money to keep the wolf from the door. And I am afraid to part
with it, too. I have given and given; but there seems some evil spell on
the principal that guards it from encroachment, so that it remains the
same, and, if I do not watch, the interest grows in the bank, with that
frightful life dead money seems endowed with, as the hair of dead, people
grows in the grave.”

“Eveleth!” her mother murmured again.

“Oh yes,” she answered, “I dare say my words are wild. I dare say they
only mean that I loathe my luxury from the bottom of my soul, and long to
be rid of it, if I only could, without harm to others and with safety to
myself.”




XXI


It seemed to me that I became suddenly sensible of this luxury for the
first time. I had certainly been aware that I was in a large and stately
house, and that I had been served and banqueted with a princely pride and
profusion. But there had, somehow, been through all a sort of simplicity,
a sort of quiet, so that I had not thought of the establishment and its
operation, even so much as I had thought of Mrs. Makely's far inferior
scale of living; or else, what with my going about so much in society, I
was ceasing to be so keenly observant of the material facts as I had been
at first. But I was better qualified to judge of what I saw, and I had
now a vivid sense of the costliness of Mrs. Strange's environment. There
were thousands of dollars in the carpets underfoot; there were tens of
thousands in the pictures on the walls. In a bronze group that withdrew
itself into a certain niche, with a faint reluctance, there was the value
of a skilled artisan's wage for five years of hard work; in the bindings
of the books that showed from the library shelves there was almost as
much money as most of the authors had got for writing them. Every
fixture, every movable, was an artistic masterpiece; a fortune, as
fortunes used to be counted even in this land of affluence, had been
lavished in the mere furnishing of a house which the palaces of nobles
and princes of other times had contributed to embellish.

“My husband,” Mrs. Strange went on, “bought this house for me, and let me
furnish it after my own fancy. After it was all done we neither of us
liked it, and when he died I felt as if he had left me in a tomb here.”

“Eveleth,” said her mother, “you ought not to speak so before Mr. Homos.
He will not know what to think of you, and he will go back to Altruria
with a very wrong idea of American women.”

At this protest, Mrs. Strange seemed to recover herself a little. “Yes,”
 she said, “you must excuse me. I have no right to speak so. But one is
often much franker with foreigners than with one's own kind, and,
besides, there is something--I don't know what--that will not let me keep
the truth from you.”

She gazed at me entreatingly, and then, as if some strong emotion swept
her from her own hold, she broke out:

“He thought he would make some sort of atonement to me, as if I owed none
to him! His money was all he had to do it with, and he spent that upon me
in every way he could think of, though he knew that money could not buy
anything that was really good, and that, if it bought anything beautiful,
it uglified it with the sense of cost to every one who could value it in
dollars and cents. He was a good man, far better than people ever
imagined, and very simple-hearted and honest, like a child, in his
contrition for his wealth, which he did not dare to get rid of; and
though I know that, if he were to come back, it would be just as it was,
his memory is as dear to me as if--”

She stopped, and pressed in her lip with her teeth, to stay its tremor.
I was painfully affected. I knew that she had never meant to be so open
with me, and was shocked and frightened at herself. I was sorry for her,
and yet I was glad, for it seemed to me that she had given me a glimpse,
not only of the truth in her own heart, but of the truth in the hearts of
a whole order of prosperous people in these lamentable conditions, whom I
shall hereafter be able to judge more leniently, more justly.

I began to speak of Altruria, as if that were what our talk had been
leading up to, and she showed herself more intelligently interested
concerning us than any one I have yet seen in this country. We appeared,
I found, neither incredible nor preposterous to her; our life, in her
eyes, had that beauty of right living which the Americans so feebly
imagine or imagine not at all. She asked what route I had come by to
America, and she seemed disappointed and aggrieved that we placed the
restrictions we have felt necessary upon visitors from the plutocratic
world. Were we afraid, she asked, that they would corrupt our citizens or
mar our content with our institutions? She seemed scarcely satisfied when
I explained, as I have explained so often here, that the measures we had
taken were rather in the interest of the plutocratic world than of the
Altrurians; and alleged the fact that no visitor from the outside had
ever been willing to go home again, as sufficient proof that we had
nothing to fear from the spread of plutocratic ideals among us. I assured
her, and this she easily imagined, that, the better known these became,
the worse they appeared to us; and that the only concern our priors felt,
in regard to them, was that our youth could not conceive of them in their
enormity, but, in seeing how estimable plutocratic people often were,
they would attribute to their conditions the inherent good of human
nature. I said our own life was so directly reasoned from its economic
premises that they could hardly believe the plutocratic life was often an
absolute non sequitur of the plutocratic premises. I confessed that this
error was at the bottom of my own wish to visit America and study those
premises.

“And what has your conclusion been?” she said, leaning eagerly towards
me, across the table between us, laden with the maps and charts we had
been examining for the verification of the position of Altruria, and my
own course here, by way of England.

A slight sigh escaped Mrs. Gray, which I interpreted as an expression of
fatigue; it was already past twelve o'clock, and I made it the pretext
for escape.

“You have seen the meaning and purport of Altruria so clearly,” I said,
“that I think I can safely leave you to guess the answer to that
question.”

She laughed, and did not try to detain me now when I offered my hand for
good-night. I fancied her mother took leave of me coldly, and with a
certain effect of inculpation.




XXII


It is long since I wrote you, and you have had reason enough to be
impatient of my silence. I submit to the reproaches of your letter, with
a due sense of my blame; whether I am altogether to blame, you shall say
after you have read this.

I cannot yet decide whether I have lost a great happiness, the greatest
that could come to any man, or escaped the worst misfortune that could
befall me. But, such as it is, I will try to set the fact honestly down.

I do not know whether you had any conjecture, from my repeated mention of
a lady whose character greatly interested me, that I was in the way of
feeling any other interest in her than my letters expressed. I am no
longer young, though at thirty-five an Altrurian is by no means so old as
an American at the same age. The romantic ideals of the American women
which I had formed from the American novels had been dissipated; if I had
any sentiment towards them, as a type, it was one of distrust, which my
very sense of the charm in their inconsequence, their beauty, their
brilliancy, served rather to intensify. I thought myself doubly defended
by that difference between their civilization and ours which forbade
reasonable hope of happiness in any sentiment for them tenderer than
that of the student of strange effects in human nature. But we have not
yet, my dear Cyril, reasoned the passions, even in Altruria.

After I last wrote you, a series of accidents, or what appeared so, threw
me more and more constantly into the society of Mrs. Strange. We began to
laugh at the fatality with which we met everywhere--at teas, at lunches,
at dinners, at evening receptions, and even at balls, where I have been a
great deal, because, with all my thirty-five years, I have not yet
outlived that fondness for dancing which has so often amused you in me.
Wherever my acquaintance widened among cultivated people, they had no
inspiration but to ask us to meet each other, as if there were really no
other woman in New York who could be expected to understand me. “You must
come to lunch (or tea, or dinner, whichever it might be), and we will
have her. She will be so much interested to meet you.”

But perhaps we should have needed none of these accidents to bring us
together. I, at least, can look back and see that, when none of them
happened, I sought occasions for seeing her, and made excuses of our
common interest in this matter and in that to go to her. As for her, I
can only say that I seldom failed to find her at home, whether I called
upon her nominal day or not, and more than once the man who let me in
said he had been charged by Mrs. Strange to say that, if I called, she
was to be back very soon; or else he made free to suggest that, though
Mrs. Strange was not at home, Mrs. Gray was; and then I found it easy
to stay until Mrs. Strange returned. The good old lady had an insatiable
curiosity about Altruria, and, though I do not think she ever quite
believed in our reality, she at least always treated me kindly, as if I
were the victim of an illusion that was thoroughly benign.

I think she had some notion that your letters, which I used often to take
with me and read to Mrs. Strange and herself, were inventions of mine;
and the fact that they bore only an English postmark confirmed her in
this notion, though I explained that in our present passive attitude
towards the world outside we had as yet no postal relations with other
countries, and, as all our communication at home was by electricity, that
we had no letter-post of our own. The very fact that she belonged to a
purer and better age in America disqualified her to conceive of Altruria;
her daughter, who had lived into a full recognition of the terrible
anarchy in which the conditions have ultimated here, could far more
vitally imagine us, and to her, I believe, we were at once a living
reality. Her perception, her sympathy, her intelligence, became more and
more to me, and I escaped to them oftener and oftener, from a world where
an Altrurian must be so painfully at odds. In all companies here I am
aware that I have been regarded either as a good joke or a bad joke,
according to the humor of the listener, and it was grateful to be taken
seriously.

From the first I was sensible of a charm in her, different from that I
felt in other American women, and impossible in our Altrurian women. She
had a deep and almost tragical seriousness, masked with a most winning
gayety, a light irony, a fine scorn that was rather for herself than for
others. She had thought herself out of all sympathy with her environment;
she knew its falsehood, its vacuity, its hopelessness; but she
necessarily remained in it and of it. She was as much at odds in it as I
was, without my poor privilege of criticism and protest, for, as she
said, she could not set herself up as a censor of things that she must
keep on doing as other people did. She could have renounced the world, as
there are ways and means of doing here; but she had no vocation to the
religious life, and she could not feign it without a sense of sacrilege.
In fact, this generous and magnanimous and gifted woman was without that
faith, that trust in God which comes to us from living His law, and
which I wonder any American can keep. She denied nothing; but she had
lost the strength to affirm anything. She no longer tried to do good from
her heart, though she kept on doing charity in what she said was a mere
mechanical impulse from the belief of other days, but always with the
ironical doubt that she was doing harm. Women are nothing by halves, as
men can be, and she was in a despair which no man can realize, for we
have always some if or and which a woman of the like mood casts from her
in wild rejection. Where she could not clearly see her way to a true
life, it was the same to her as an impenetrable darkness.

You will have inferred something of all this from what I have written of
her before, and from words of hers that I have reported to you. Do you
think it so wonderful, then, that in the joy I felt at the hope, the
solace, which my story of our life seemed to give her, she should become
more and more precious to me? It was not wonderful, either, I think, that
she should identify me with that hope, that solace, and should suffer
herself to lean upon me, in a reliance infinitely sweet and endearing.
But what a fantastic dream it now appears!




XXIII


I can hardly tell you just how we came to own our love to each other; but
one day I found myself alone with her mother, with the sense that
Eveleth had suddenly withdrawn from the room at the knowledge of my
approach. Mrs. Gray was strongly moved by something; but she governed
herself, and, after giving me a tremulous hand, bade me sit.

“Will you excuse me, Mr. Homos,” she began, “if I ask you whether you
intend to make America your home after this?”

“Oh no!” I answered, and I tried to keep out of my voice the despair with
which the notion filled me. I have sometimes had nightmares here, in
which I thought that I was an American by choice, and I can give you no
conception of the rapture of awakening to the fact that I could still go
back to Altruria, that I had not cast my lot with this wretched people.
“How could I do that?” I faltered; and I was glad to perceive that I had
imparted to her no hint of the misery which I had felt at such a notion.
“I mean, by getting naturalized, and becoming a citizen, and taking up
your residence among us.”

“No,” I answered, as quietly as I could, “I had not thought of that.”

“And you still intend to go back to Altruria?”

“I hope so; I ought to have gone back long ago, and if I had not met the
friends I have in this house--” I stopped, for I did not know how I
should end what I had begun to say.

“I am glad you think we are your friends,” said the lady, “for we have
tried to show ourselves your friends. I feel as if this had given me the
right to say something to you that you may think very odd.”

“Say anything to me, my dear lady,” I returned. “I shall not think it
unkind, no matter how odd it is.”

“Oh, it's nothing. It's merely that--that when you are not here with us I
lose my grasp on Altruria, and--and I begin to doubt--”

I smiled. “I know! People here have often hinted something of that kind
to me. Tell me, Mrs. Gray, do Americans generally take me for an
impostor?”

“Oh no!” she answered, fervently. “Everybody that I have heard speak of
you has the highest regard for you, and believes you perfectly sincere.
But--”

“But what?” I entreated.

“They think you may be mistaken.”

“Then they think I am out of my wits--that I am in an hallucination!”

“No, not that,” she returned. “But it is so very difficult for us to
conceive of a whole nation living, as you say you do, on the same terms
as one family, and no one trying to get ahead of another, or richer, and
having neither inferiors nor superiors, but just one dead level of
equality, where there is no distinction except by natural gifts and good
deeds or beautiful works. It seems impossible--it seems ridiculous.”

“Yes,” I confessed, “I know that it seems so to the Americans.”

“And I must tell you something else, Mr. Homos, and I hope you won't take
it amiss. The first night when you talked about Altruria here, and showed
us how you had come, by way of England, and the place where Altruria
ought to be on our maps, I looked them over, after you were gone, and I
could make nothing of it. I have often looked at the map since, but I
could never find Altruria; it was no use.”

“Why,” I said, “if you will let me have your atlas--”

She shook her head. “It would be the same again as soon as you went
away.” I could not conceal my distress, and she went on: “Now, you
mustn't mind what I say. I'm nothing but a silly old woman, and
Eveleth would never forgive me if she could know what I've been saying.”

“Then Mrs. Strange isn't troubled, as you are, concerning me?” I asked,
and I confess my anxiety attenuated my voice almost to a whisper.

“She won't admit that she is. It might be better for her if she would.
But Eveleth is very true to her friends, and that--that makes me all the
more anxious that she should not deceive herself.”

“Oh, Mrs. Gray!” I could not keep a certain tone of reproach out of my
words.

She began to weep. “There! I knew I should hurt your feelings. But you
mustn't mind what I say. I beg your pardon! I take it all back--”

“Ah, I don't want you to take it back! But what proof shall I give you
that there is such a land as Altruria? If the darkness implies the day,
America must imply Altruria. In what way do I seem false, or mad, except
that I claim to be the citizen of a country where people love one another
as the first Christians did?”

“That is just it,” she returned. “Nobody can imagine the first
Christians, and do you think we can imagine anything like them in our own
day?”

“But Mrs. Strange--she imagines us, you say?”

“She thinks she does; but I am afraid she only thinks so, and I know her
better than you do, Mr. Homos. I know how enthusiastic she always was,
and how unhappy she has been since she has lost her hold on faith, and
how eagerly she has caught at the hope you have given her of a higher
life on earth than we live here. If she should ever find out that she was
wrong, I don't know what would become of her. You mustn't mind me; you
mustn't let me wound you by what I say.”

“You don't wound me, and I only thank you for what you say; but I entreat
you to believe in me. Mrs. Strange has not deceived herself, and I have
not deceived her. Shall I protest to you, by all I hold sacred, that I am
really what I told you I was; that I am not less, and that Altruria is
infinitely more, happier, better, gladder, than any words of mine can
say? Shall I not have the happiness to see your daughter to-day? I had
something to say to her--and now I have so much more! If she is in the
house, won't you send to her? I can make her understand--”

I stopped at a certain expression which I fancied I saw in Mrs. Gray's
face.

“Mr. Homos,” she began, so very seriously that my heart trembled with a
vague misgiving, “sometimes I think you had better not see my daughter
any more.”

“Not see her any more?” I gasped.

“Yes; I don't see what good can come of it, and it's all very strange and
uncanny. I don't know how to explain it; but, indeed, it isn't anything
personal. It's because you are of a state of things so utterly opposed to
human nature that I don't see how--I am afraid that--”

“But I am not uncanny to _her!_” I entreated. “I am not unnatural,
not incredible--”

“Oh no; that is the worst of it. But I have said too much; I have said a
great deal more than I ought. But you must excuse it: I am an old woman.
I am not very well, and I suppose it's that that makes me talk so much.”

She rose from her chair, and I, perforce, rose from mine and made a
movement towards her.

“No, no,” she said, “I don't need any help. You must come again soon and
see us, and show that you've forgotten what I've said.” She gave me her
hand, and I could not help bending over it and kissing it. She gave a
little, pathetic whimper. “Oh, I _know_ I've said the most dreadful
things to you.”

“You haven't said anything that takes your friendship from me, Mrs. Gray,
and that is what I care for.” My own eyes filled with tears--I do not
know why--and I groped my way from the room. Without seeing any one in
the obscurity of the hallway, where I found myself, I was aware of some
one there, by that sort of fine perception which makes us know the
presence of a spirit.

“You are going?” a whisper said. “Why are you going?” And Eveleth had me
by the hand and was drawing me gently into the dim drawing-room that
opened from the place. “I don't know all my mother has been saying to
you. I had to let her say something; she thought she ought. I knew you
would know how to excuse it.”

“Oh, my dearest!” I said, and why I said this I do not know, or how we
found ourselves in each other's arms.

“What are we doing?” she murmured.

“You don't believe I am an impostor, an illusion, a visionary?” I
besought her, straining her closer to my heart.

“I believe in you, with all my soul!” she answered.

We sat down, side by side, and talked long. I did not go away the whole
day. With a high disdain of convention, she made me stay. Her mother sent
word that she would not be able to come to dinner, and we were alone
together at table, in an image of what our united lives might be. We
spent the evening in that happy interchange of trivial confidences that
lovers use in symbol of the unutterable raptures that fill them. We were
there in what seemed an infinite present, without a past, without a
future.




XXIV


Society had to be taken into our confidence, and Mrs. Makely saw to it
that there were no reserves with society. Our engagement was not quite
like that of two young persons, but people found in our character and
circumstance an interest far transcending that felt in the engagement of
the most romantic lovers. Some note of the fact came to us by accident,
as one evening when we stood near a couple and heard them talking. “It
must be very weird,” the man said; “something like being engaged to a
materialization.” “Yes,” said the girl, “quite the Demon Lover business,
I should think.” She glanced round, as people do, in talking, and, at
sight of us, she involuntarily put her hand over her mouth. I looked at
Eveleth; there was nothing expressed in her face but a generous anxiety
for me. But so far as the open attitude of society towards us was
concerned, nothing could have been more flattering. We could hardly have
been more asked to meet each other than before; but now there were
entertainments in special recognition of our betrothal, which Eveleth
said could not be altogether refused, though she found the ordeal as
irksome as I did. In America, however, you get used to many things. I
do not know why it should have been done, but in the society columns of
several of the great newspapers our likenesses were printed, from
photographs procured I cannot guess how, with descriptions of our persons
as to those points of coloring and carriage and stature which the
pictures could not give, and with biographies such as could be
ascertained in her case and imagined in mine. In some of the society
papers, paragraphs of a surprising scurrility appeared, attacking me as
an impostor, and aspersing the motives of Eveleth in her former marriage,
and treating her as a foolish crank or an audacious flirt. The goodness
of her life, her self-sacrifice and works of benevolence, counted for no
more against these wanton attacks than the absolute inoffensiveness of my
own; the writers knew no harm of her, and they knew nothing at all of me;
but they devoted us to the execration of their readers simply because we
formed apt and ready themes for paragraphs. You may judge of how wild
they were in their aim when some of them denounced me as an Altrurian
plutocrat!

We could not escape this storm of notoriety; we had simply to let it
spend its fury. When it began, several reporters of both sexes came to
interview me, and questioned me, not only as to all the facts of my past
life, and all my purposes in the future, but as to my opinion of
hypnotism, eternal punishment, the Ibsen drama, and the tariff reform. I
did my best to answer them seriously, and certainly I answered them
civilly; but it seemed from what they printed that the answers I gave did
not concern them, for they gave others for me. They appeared to me for
the most part kindly and well-meaning young people, though vastly
ignorant of vital things. They had apparently visited me with minds made
up, or else their reports were revised by some controlling hand, and a
quality injected more in the taste of the special journals they
represented than in keeping with the facts. When I realized this, I
refused to see any more reporters, or to answer them, and then they
printed the questions they had prepared to ask me, in such form that my
silence was made of the same damaging effect as a full confession of
guilt upon the charges.

The experience was so strange and new to me that it affected me in a
degree I was unwilling to let Eveleth imagine. But she divined my
distress, and, when she divined that it was chiefly for her, she set
herself to console and reassure me. She told me that this was something
every one here expected, in coming willingly or unwillingly before the
public; and that I must not think of it at all, for certainly no one else
would think twice of it. This, I found, was really so, for when I
ventured to refer tentatively to some of these publications, I found that
people, if they had read them, had altogether forgotten them; and that
they were, with all the glare of print, of far less effect with our
acquaintance than something said under the breath in a corner. I found
that some of our friends had not known the effigies for ours which they
had seen in the papers; others made a joke of the whole affair, as the
Americans do with so many affairs, and said that they supposed the
pictures were those of people who had been cured by some patent medicine,
they looked so strong and handsome. This, I think, was a piece of Mr.
Makely's humor in the beginning; but it had a general vogue long after
the interviews and the illustrations were forgotten.




XXV


I linger a little upon these trivial matters because I shrink from what
must follow. They were scarcely blots upon our happiness; rather they
were motes in the sunshine which had no other cloud. It is true that I
was always somewhat puzzled by a certain manner in Mrs. Gray, which
certainly was from no unfriendliness for me; she could not have been more
affectionate to me, after our engagement, if I had been really her own
son; and it was not until after our common kindness had confirmed itself
upon the new footing that I felt this perplexing qualification on it. I
felt it first one day when I found her alone, and I talked long and
freely to her of Eveleth, and opened to her my whole heart of joy in our
love. At one point she casually asked me how soon we should expect to
return from Altruria after our visit; and at first I did not understand.

“Of course,” she explained, “you will want to see all your old friends,
and so will Eveleth, for they will be her friends, too; but if you want
me to go with you, as you say, you must let me know when I shall see New
York again.”

“Why,” I said, “you will always be with us.”

“Well, then,” she pursued, with a smile, “when shall _you_ come
back?”

“Oh, never!” I answered. “No one ever leaves Altruria, if he can help it,
unless he is sent on a mission.”

She looked a little mystified, and I went on: “Of course, I was not
officially authorized to visit the world outside, but I was permitted to
do so, to satisfy a curiosity the priors thought useful; but I have now
had quite enough of it, and I shall never leave home again.”

“You won't come to live in America?”

“God forbid!” said I, and I am afraid I could not hide the horror that
ran through me at the thought. “And when you once see our happy country,
you could no more be persuaded to return to America than a disembodied
spirit could be persuaded to return to the earth.”

She was silent, and I asked: “But, surely, you understood this, Mrs.
Gray?”

“No,” she said, reluctantly. “Does Eveleth?”

“Why, certainly,” I said. “We have talked it over a hundred times. Hasn't
she--”

“I don't know,” she returned, with a vague trouble in her voice and eyes.
“Perhaps I haven't understood her exactly. Perhaps--but I shall be ready
to do whatever you and she think best. I am an old woman, you know; and,
you know, I was born here, and I should feel the change.”

Her words conveyed to me a delicate reproach; I felt for the first time
that, in my love of my own country, I had not considered her love of
hers. It is said that the Icelanders are homesick when they leave their
world of lava and snow; and I ought to have remembered that an American
might have some such tenderness for his atrocious conditions, if he were
exiled from them forever. I suppose it was the large and wide mind of
Eveleth, with its openness to a knowledge and appreciation of better
things, that had suffered me to forget this. She seemed always so eager
to see Altruria, she imagined it so fully, so lovingly, that I had ceased
to think of her as an alien; she seemed one of us, by birth as well as by
affinity.

Yet now the words of her mother, and the light they threw upon the
situation, gave me pause. I began to ask myself questions I was impatient
to ask Eveleth, so that there should be no longer any shadow of misgiving
in my breast; and yet I found myself dreading to ask them, lest by some
perverse juggle I had mistaken our perfect sympathy for a perfect
understanding.




XXVI


Like all cowards who wait a happy moment for the duty that should not be
suffered to wait at all, I was destined to have the affair challenge me,
instead of seizing the advantage of it that instant frankness would have
given me. Shall I confess that I let several days go by, and still had
not spoken to Eveleth, when, at the end of a long evening--the last long
evening we passed together--she said:

“What would you like to have me do with this house while we are gone?”

“Do with this house?” I echoed; and I felt as if I were standing on the
edge of an abyss.

“Yes; shall we let it, or sell it--or what? Or give it away?” I drew a
little breath at this; perhaps we had not misunderstood each other, after
all. She went on: “Of course, I have a peculiar feeling about it, so that
I wouldn't like to get it ready and let it furnished, in the ordinary
way. I would rather lend it to some one, if I could be sure of any one
who would appreciate it; but I can't. Not one. And it's very much the
same when one comes to think about selling it. Yes, I should like to give
it away for some good purpose, if there is any in this wretched state of
things. What do you say, Aristide?”

She always used the French form of my name, because she said it sounded
ridiculous in English, for a white man, though I told her that the
English was nearer the Greek in sound.

“By all means, give it away,” I said. “Give it for some public purpose.
That will at least be better than any private purpose, and put it somehow
in the control of the State, beyond the reach of individuals or
corporations. Why not make it the foundation of a free school for the
study of the Altrurian polity?”

She laughed at this, as if she thought I must be joking. “It would be
droll, wouldn't it, to have Tammany appointees teaching Altrurianism?”
 Then she said, after a moment of reflection: “Why not? It needn't be in
the hands of Tammany. It could be in the hands of the United States; I
will ask my lawyer if it couldn't; and I will endow it with money enough
to support the school handsomely. Aristide, you have hit it!”

I began: “You can give _all_ your money to it, my dear--” But I
stopped at the bewildered look she turned on me.

“All?” she repeated. “But what should we have to live on, then?”

“We shall need no money to live on in Altruria,” I answered.

“Oh, in Altruria! But when we come back to New York?”

It was an agonizing moment, and I felt that shutting of the heart which
blinds the eyes and makes the brain reel. “Eveleth,” I gasped, “did you
expect to return to New York?”

“Why, certainly!” she cried. “Not at once, of course. But after you had
seen your friends, and made a good, long visit--Why, surely, Aristide,
you don't understand that I--You didn't mean to _live_ in Altruria?”

“Ah!” I answered. “Where else could I live? Did you think for an instant
that I could live in such a land as this?” I saw that she was hurt, and I
hastened to say: “I know that it is the best part of the world outside of
Altruria, but, oh, my dear, you cannot imagine how horrible the notion of
living here seems to me. Forgive me. I am going from bad to worse. I
don't mean to wound you. After all, it is your country, and you must love
it. But, indeed, I could not think of living here. I could not take the
burden of its wilful misery on my soul. I must live in Altruria, and you,
when you have once seen my country, _our_ country, will never
consent to live in any other.”

“Yes,” she said, “I know it must be very beautiful; but I hadn't
supposed--and yet I ought--”

“No, dearest, no! It was I who was to blame, for not being clearer from
the first. But that is the way with us. We can't imagine any people
willing to live anywhere else when once they have seen Altruria; and I
have told you so much of it, and we have talked of it together so often,
that I must have forgotten you had not actually known it. But listen,
Eveleth. We will agree to this: After we have been a year in Altruria,
if you wish to return to America I will come back and live with you
here.”

“No, indeed!” she answered, generously. “If you are to be my husband,”
 and here she began with the solemn words of the Bible, so beautiful in
their quaint English, “'whither thou goest, I will go, and I will not
return from following after thee. Thy country shall be my country, and
thy God my God.”

I caught her to my heart, in a rapture of tenderness, and the evening
that had begun for us so forbiddingly ended in a happiness such as not
even our love had known before. I insisted upon the conditions I had
made, as to our future home, and she agreed to them gayly at last, as a
sort of reparation which I might make my conscience, if I liked, for
tearing her from a country which she had willingly lived out of for the
far greater part of the last five years.

But when we met again I could see that she had been thinking seriously.

“I won't give the house absolutely away,” she said. “I will keep the deed
of it myself, but I will establish that sort of school of Altrurian
doctrine in it, and I will endow it, and when we come back here, for our
experimental sojourn, after we've been in Altruria a year, we'll take up
our quarters in it--I won't give the whole house to the school--and we
will lecture on the later phases of Altrurian life to the pupils. How
will that do?”

She put her arms around my neck, and I said that it would do admirably;
but I had a certain sinking of the heart, for I saw how hard it was even
for Eveleth to part with her property.

“I'll endow it,” she went on, “and I'll leave the rest of my money at
interest here; unless you think that some Altrurian securities--”

“No; there are no such things!” I cried.

“That was what I thought,” she returned; “and as it will cost us nothing
while we are in Altruria, the interest will be something very handsome by
the time we get back, even in United States bonds.”

“Something handsome!” I cried. “But, Eveleth, haven't I heard you say
yourself that the growth of interest from dead money was like--”

“Oh yes; that!” she returned. “But you know you have to take it. You
can't let the money lie idle: that would be ridiculous; and then, with
the good purpose we have in view, it is our _duty_ to take the
interest. How should we keep up the school, and pay the teachers, and
everything?”

I saw that she had forgotten the great sum of the principal, or that,
through lifelong training and association, it was so sacred to her that
she did not even dream of touching it. I was silent, and she thought that
I was persuaded.

“You are perfectly right in theory, dear, and I feel just as you do about
such things; I'm sure I've suffered enough from them; but if we didn't
take interest for your money, what should we have to live on?”

“Not _my_ money, Eveleth!” I entreated. “Don't say _my_ money!”

“But whatever is mine is yours,” she returned, with a wounded air.

“Not your money; but I hope you will soon have none. We should need no
money to live on in Altruria. Our share of the daily work of all will
amply suffice for our daily bread and shelter.”

“In Altruria, yes. But how about America? And you have promised to come
back here in a year, you know. Ladies and gentlemen can't share in the
daily toil here, even if they could get the toil, and, where there are so
many out of work, it isn't probable they could.”

She dropped upon my knee as she spoke, laughing, and put her hand under
my chin, to lift my fallen face.

“Now you mustn't be a goose, Aristide, even if you _are_ an angel!
Now listen. You _know_, don't you, that I hate money just as badly
as you?”

“You have made me think so, Eveleth,” I answered.

“I hate it and loathe it. I think it's the source of all the sin and
misery in the world; but you can't get rid of it at a blow. For if you
gave it away you might do more harm than good with it.”

“You could destroy it,” I said.

“Not unless you were a crank,” she returned. “And that brings me just to
the point. I know that I'm doing a very queer thing to get married, when
we know so little, really, about you,” and she accented this confession
with a laugh that was also a kiss. “But I want to show people that we are
just as practical as anybody; and if they can know that I have left my
money in United States bonds, they'll respect us, no matter what I do
with the interest. Don't you see? We can come back, and preach and teach
Altrurianism, and as long as we pay our way nobody will have a right
to say a word. Why, Tolstoy himself doesn't destroy his money, though he
wants other people to do it. His wife keeps it, and supports the family.
You _have_ to do it.”

“He doesn't do it willingly.”

“No. And _we_ won't. And after a while--after we've got back, and
compared Altruria and America from practical experience, if we decide to
go and live there altogether, I will let you do what you please with
the hateful money. I suppose we couldn't take it there with us?”

“No more than you could take it to heaven with you,” I answered,
solemnly; but she would not let me be altogether serious about it.

“Well, in either case we could get on without it, though we certainly
could not get on without it here. Why, Aristide, it is essential to the
influence we shall try to exert for Altrurianism; for if we came back
here and preached the true life without any money to back us, no one
would pay any attention to us. But if we have a good house waiting for
us, and are able to entertain nicely, we can attract the best people,
and--and--really do some good.”




XXVII


I rose in a distress which I could not hide. “Oh, Eveleth, Eveleth!” I
cried. “You are like all the rest, poor child! You are the creature of
your environment, as we all are. You cannot escape what you have been.
It may be that I was wrong to wish or expect you to cast your lot with me
in Altruria, at once and forever. It may be that it is my duty to return
here with you after a time, not only to let you see that Altruria is
best, but to end my days in this unhappy land, preaching and teaching
Altrurianism; but we must not come as prophets to the comfortable people,
and entertain nicely. If we are to renew the evangel, it must be in the
life and the spirit of the First Altrurian: we must come poor to the
poor; we must not try to win any one, save through his heart and
conscience; we must be as simple and humble as the least of those that
Christ bade follow Him. Eveleth, perhaps you have made a mistake. I love
you too much to wish you to suffer even for your good. Yes, I am so weak
as that. I did not think that this would be the sacrifice for you that it
seems, and I will not ask it of you. I am sorry that we have not
understood each other, as I supposed we had. I could never become an
American; perhaps you could never become an Altrurian. Think of it,
dearest. Think well of it, before you take the step which you cannot
recede from. I hold you to no promise; I love you so dearly that I cannot
let you hold yourself. But you must choose between me and your money--no,
not me--but between love and your money. You cannot keep both.”

She had stood listening to me; now she cast herself on my heart and
stopped my words with an impassioned kiss. “Then there is no choice for
me. My choice is made, once for all.” She set her hands against my breast
and pushed me from her. “Go now; but come again to-morrow. I want to
think it all over again. Not that I have any doubt, but because you wish
it--you wish it, don't you?--and because I will not let you ever think I
acted upon an impulse, and that I regretted it.”

“That is right, Eveleth. That is like _you_” I said, and I took her
into my arms for good-night.

The next day I came for her decision, or rather for her confirmation of
it. The man who opened the door to me met me with a look of concern and
embarrassment. He said Mrs. Strange was not at all well, and had told him
he was to give me the letter he handed me. I asked, in taking it, if I
could see Mrs. Gray, and he answered that Mrs. Gray had not been down
yet, but he would go and see. I was impatient to read my letter, and I
made I know not what vague reply, and I found myself, I know not how, on
the pavement, with the letter open in my hand. It began abruptly without
date or address:

_“You will believe that I have not slept, when you read this.

“I have thought it all over again, as you wished, and it is all over
between us.

“I am what you said, the creature of my environment. I cannot detach
myself from it; I cannot escape from what I have been.

“I am writing this with a strange coldness, like the chill of death, in
my very soul. I do not ask you to forgive me; I have your forgiveness
already. Do not forget me; that is what I ask. Remember me as the
unhappy woman who was not equal to her chance when heaven was opened to
her, who could not choose the best when the best came to her.

“There is no use writing; if I kept on forever, it would always be the
same cry of shame, of love.

“Eveleth Strange.”_

I reeled as I read the lines. The street seemed to weave itself into a
circle around me. But I knew that I was not dreaming, that this was no
delirium of my sleep.

It was three days ago, and I have not tried to see her again. I have
written her a line, to say that I shall not forget her, and to take the
blame upon myself. I expected the impossible of her.

I have yet two days before me until the steamer sails; we were to have
sailed together, and now I shall sail alone.

I will try to leave it all behind me forever; but while I linger out
these last long hours here I must think and I must doubt.

Was she, then, the _poseuse_ that they said? Had she really no hear
in our love? Was it only a pretty drama she was playing, and were those
generous motives, those lofty principles which seemed to actuate her, the
poetical qualities of the play, the graces of her pose? I cannot believe
it. I believe that she was truly what she seemed, for she had been that
even before she met me. I believe that she was pure and lofty in soul as
she appeared; but that her life was warped to such a form by the false
conditions of this sad world that, when she came to look at herself
again, after she had been confronted with the sacrifice before her, she
feared that she could not make it without in a manner ceasing to be.

She--

But I shall soon see you again; and, until then, farewell.

END OF PART I




PART SECOND




I


I could hardly have believed, my dear Dorothea, that I should be so late
in writing to you from Altruria, but you can easily believe that I am
thoroughly ashamed of myself for my neglect. It is not for want of
thinking of you, or talking of you, that I have seemed so much more
ungrateful than I am. My husband and I seldom have any serious talk which
doesn't somehow come round to you. He admires you and likes you as much
as I do, and he does his best, poor man, to understand you; but his not
understanding you is only a part of his general failure to understand how
any American can be kind and good in conditions which he considers so
abominable as those of the capitalistic world. He is not nearly so severe
on us as he used to be at times when he was among us. When the other
Altrurians are discussing us he often puts in a reason for us against
their logic; and I think he has really forgotten, a good deal, how bad
things are with us, or else finds his own memory of them incredible. But
his experience of the world outside his own country has taught him how to
temper the passion of the Altrurians for justice with a tolerance of the
unjust; and when they bring him to book on his own report of us he tries
to explain us away, and show how we are not so bad as we ought to be.

For weeks after we came to Altruria I was so unhistorically blest that if
I had been disposed to give you a full account of myself I should have
had no events to hang the narrative on. Life here is so subjective (if
you don't know what that is, you poor dear, you must get Mr. Twelvemough
to explain) that there is usually nothing like news in it, and I always
feel that the difference between Altruria and America is so immense that
it is altogether beyond me to describe it. But now we have had some
occurrences recently, quite in the American sense, and these have
furnished me with an incentive as well as opportunity to send you a
letter. Do you remember how, one evening after dinner, in New York, you
and I besieged my husband and tried to make him tell us why Altruria was
so isolated from the rest of the world, and why such a great and
enlightened continent should keep itself apart? I see still his look of
horror when Mr. Makely suggested that the United States should send an
expedition and “open” Altruria, as Commodore Perry “opened” Japan in
1850, and try to enter into commercial relations with it. The best he
could do was to say what always seemed so incredible, and keep on
assuring us that Altruria wished for no sort of public relations with
Europe or America, but was very willing to depend for an indefinite time
for its communication with those regions on vessels putting into its
ports from stress of one kind or other, or castaway on its coasts. They
are mostly trading-ships or whalers, and they come a great deal oftener
than yo

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