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+Project Gutenberg's Through the Eye of the Needle, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Through the Eye of the Needle
+       A Romance
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+
+Release Date: June, 2005 [EBook #8295]
+This file was first posted on July 26, 2003
+Last Updated: February 25, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THROUGH THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Musser, Charles Franks and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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 you suppose; you do not hear of them afterwards, because their crews
+are poor, ignorant people, whose stories of their adventures are always
+distrusted, and who know they would be laughed at if they told the
+stories they could of a country like Altruria. My husband himself took
+one of their vessels on her home voyage when he came to us, catching the
+Australasian steamer at New Zealand; and now I am writing you by the same
+sort of opportunity. I shall have time enough to write you a longer
+letter than you will care to read; the ship does not sail for a week yet,
+because it is so hard to get her crew together.
+
+Now that I have actually made a beginning, my mind goes back so strongly
+to that terrible night when I came to you after Aristides (I always use
+the English form of his name now) left New York that I seem to be living
+the tragedy over again, and this happiness of mine here is like a dream
+which I cannot trust. It was not all tragedy, though, and I remember how
+funny Mr. Makely was, trying to keep his face straight when the whole
+truth had to come out, and I confessed that I had expected, without
+really knowing it myself, that Aristides would disregard that wicked note
+I had written him and come and make me marry him, not against my will,
+but against my word. Of course I didn't put it in just that way, but in a
+way to let you both guess it. The first glimmering of hope that I had was
+when Mr. Makely said, “Then, when a woman tells a man that all is over
+between them forever, she means that she would like to discuss the
+business with him?” I was old enough to be ashamed, but it seemed to me
+that you and I had gone back in that awful moment and were two girls
+together, just as we used to be at school. I was proud of the way you
+stood up for me, because I thought that if you could tolerate me after
+what I had confessed I could not be quite a fool. I knew that I deserved
+at least some pity, and though I laughed with Mr. Makely, I was glad of
+your indignation with him, and of your faith in Aristides. When it came
+to the question of what I should do, I don't know which of you I owed the
+most to. It was a kind of comfort to have Mr. Makely acknowledge that
+though he regarded Aristides as a myth, still he believed that he was a
+thoroughly _good_ myth, and couldn't tell a lie if he wanted to; and I
+loved you, and shall love you more than any one else but him, for saying
+that Aristides was the most real man you had ever met, and that if
+everything he said was untrue you would trust him to the end of the
+world.
+
+But, Dolly, it wasn't all comedy, any more than it was all tragedy, and
+when you and I had laughed and cried ourselves to the point where there
+was nothing for me to do but to take the next boat for Liverpool, and Mr.
+Makely had agreed to look after the tickets and cable Aristides that I
+was coming, there was still my poor, dear mother to deal with. There is
+no use trying to conceal from you that she was always opposed to my
+husband. She thought there was something uncanny about him, though she
+felt as we did that there was nothing uncanny _in_ him; but a man
+who pretended to come from a country where there was no riches and no
+poverty could not be trusted with any woman's happiness; and though she
+could not help loving him, she thought I ought to tear him out of my
+heart, and if I could not do that I ought to have myself shut up in an
+asylum. We had a dreadful time when I told her what I had decided to do,
+and I was almost frantic. At last, when she saw that I was determined to
+follow him, she yielded, not because she was convinced, but because she
+could not give me up; I wouldn't have let her if she could. I believe
+that the only thing which reconciled her was that you and Mr. Makely
+believed in him, and thought I had better do what I wanted to, if nothing
+could keep me from it. I shall never, never forget Mr. Makely's goodness
+in coming to talk with her, and how skillfully he managed, without
+committing himself to Altruria, to declare his faith in my Altrurian.
+Even then she was troubled about what she thought the indelicacy of my
+behavior in following him across the sea, and she had all sorts of doubts
+as to how he would receive me when we met in Liverpool. It wasn't very
+reasonable of me to say that if he cast me off I should still love him
+more than any other human being, and his censure would be more precious
+to me than the praise of the rest of the world.
+
+I suppose I hardly knew what I was saying, but when once I had yielded to
+my love for him there was nothing else in life. I could not have left my
+mother behind, but in her opposition to me she seemed like an enemy, and
+I should somehow have _forced_ her to go if she had not yielded. When she
+did yield, she yielded with her whole heart and soul, and so far from
+hindering me in my preparations for the voyage, I do not believe I could
+have got off without her. She thought about everything, and it was her
+idea to leave my business affairs entirely in Mr. Makely's hands, and
+to trust the future for the final disposition of my property. I did not
+care for it myself; I hated it, because it was that which had stood
+between me and Aristides; but she foresaw that if by any wild
+impossibility he should reject me when we met, I should need it for the
+life I must go back to in New York. She behaved like a martyr as well as
+a heroine, for till we reached Altruria she was a continual sacrifice to
+me. She stubbornly doubted the whole affair, but now I must do her the
+justice to say that she has been convinced by the fact. The best she can
+say of it is that it is like the world of her girlhood; and she has gone
+back to the simple life here from the artificial life in New York, with
+the joy of a child. She works the whole day, and she would play if she
+had ever learned how. She is a better Altrurian than I am; if there could
+be a bigoted Altrurian my mother would be one.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+I sent you a short letter from Liverpool, saying that by the
+unprecedented delays of the _Urania_, which I had taken because it was
+the swiftest boat of the Neptune line, we had failed to pass the old,
+ten-day, single-screw Galaxy liner which Aristides had sailed in. I had
+only time for a word to you; but a million words could not have told the
+agonies I suffered, and when I overtook him on board the Orient Pacific
+steamer at Plymouth, where she touched, I could just scribble off the
+cable sent Mr. Makely before our steamer put off again. I am afraid you
+did not find my cable very expressive, but I was glad that I did not try
+to say more, for if I had tried I should simply have gibbered, at a
+shilling a gibber. I expected to make amends by a whole volume of
+letters, and I did post a dozen under one cover from Colombo. If they
+never reached you I am very sorry, for now it is impossible to take up
+the threads of that time and weave them into any sort of connected
+pattern. You will have to let me off with saying that Aristides was
+everything that I believed he would be and was never really afraid he
+might not be. From the moment we caught sight of each other at Plymouth,
+he at the rail of the steamer and I on the deck of the tender, we were as
+completely one as we are now. I never could tell how I got aboard to him;
+whether he came down and brought me, or whether I was simply rapt through
+the air to his side. It would have been embarrassing if we had not
+treated the situation frankly; but such odd things happen among the
+English going out to their different colonies that our marriage, by a
+missionary returning to his station, was not even a nine days' wonder
+with our fellow-passengers.
+
+We were a good deal more than nine days on the steamer before we could
+get a vessel that would take us on to Altruria; but we overhauled a ship
+going there for provisions at last, and we were all put off on her, bag
+and baggage, with three cheers from the friends we were leaving; I think
+they thought we were going to some of the British islands that the
+Pacific is full of. I had been thankful from the first that I had not
+brought a maid, knowing the Altrurian prejudice against hireling service,
+but I never was so glad as I was when we got aboard that vessel, for when
+the captain's wife, who was with him, found that I had no one to look
+after me, she looked after me herself, just for the fun of it, she
+said; but _I_ knew it was the love of it. It was a sort of general
+trading-ship, stopping at the different islands in the South Seas, and
+had been a year out from home, where the kind woman had left her little
+ones; she cried over their photographs to me. Her husband had been in
+Altruria before, and he and Aristides were old acquaintances and met like
+brothers; some of the crew knew him, too, and the captain relaxed
+discipline so far as to let us shake hands with the second-mate as the
+men's representative.
+
+I needn't dwell on the incidents of our home-coming--for that was what it
+seemed for my mother and me as well as for my husband--but I must give
+you one detail of our reception, for I still think it almost the
+prettiest thing that has happened to us among the millions of pretty
+things. Aristides had written home of our engagement, and he was expected
+with his American wife; and before we came to anchor the captain ran up
+the Emissary's signal, which my husband gave him, and then three boats
+left the shore and pulled rapidly out to us. As they came nearer I saw
+the first Altrurian costumes in the lovely colors that the people wear
+here, and that make a group of them look like a flower-bed; and then I
+saw that the boats were banked with flowers along the gunwales from stem
+to stern, and that they were each not _manned,_ but _girled_ by six
+rowers, who pulled as true a stroke as I ever saw in our boat-races. When
+they caught sight of us, leaning over the side, and Aristides lifted his
+hat and waved it to them, they all stood their oars upright, and burst
+into a kind of welcome song: I had been dreading one of those stupid,
+banging salutes of ten or twenty guns, and you can imagine what a relief
+it was. They were great, splendid creatures, as tall as our millionaires'
+tallest daughters, and as strong-looking as any of our college-girl
+athletes; and when we got down over the ship's side, and Aristides said a
+few words of introduction for my mother and me, as we stepped into the
+largest of the boats, I thought they would crush me, catching me in their
+strong, brown arms, and kissing me on each cheek; they never kiss on the
+mouth in Altruria. The girls in the other boats kissed their hands to
+mother and me, and shouted to Aristides, and then, when our boat set out
+for the shore, they got on each side of us and sang song after song as
+they pulled even stroke with our crew. Half-way, we met three other
+boats, really _manned,_ these ones, and going out to get our baggage, and
+then you ought to have heard the shouting and laughing, that ended in
+more singing, when the young fellows' voices mixed with the girls, till
+they were lost in the welcome that came off to us from the crowded quay,
+where I should have thought half Altruria had gathered to receive us.
+
+I was afraid it was going to be too much for my mother, but she stood it
+bravely; and almost at a glance people began to take her into
+consideration, and she was delivered over to two young married ladies,
+who saw that she was made comfortable, the first of any, in the pretty
+Regionic guest-house where they put us.
+
+I wish I could give you a notion of that guest-house, with its cool,
+quiet rooms, and its lawned and gardened enclosure, and a little fountain
+purring away among the flowers! But what astonished me was that there
+were no sort of carriages, or wheeled conveyances, which, after our
+escort from the ship, I thought might very well have met the returning
+Emissary and his wife. They made my mother get into a litter, with soft
+cushions and with lilac curtains blowing round it, and six girls carried
+her up to the house; but they seemed not to imagine my not walking, and,
+in fact, I could hardly have imagined it myself, after the first moment
+of queerness. That walk was full of such rich experience for every one of
+the senses that I would not have missed a step of it; but as soon as I
+could get Aristides alone I asked him about horses, and he said that
+though horses were still used in farm work, not a horse was allowed in
+any city or village of Altruria, because of their filthiness. As for
+public vehicles, they used to have electric trolleys; in the year that he
+had been absent they had substituted electric motors; but these were not
+running, because it was a holiday on which we had happened to arrive.
+
+There was another incident of my first day which I think will amuse you,
+knowing how I have always shrunk from any sort of public appearances.
+When Aristides went to make his report to the people assembled in a sort
+of convention, I had to go too, and take part in the proceedings; for
+women are on an entire equality with the men here, and people would be
+shocked if husband and wife were separated in their public life. They did
+not spare me a single thing. Where Aristides was not very clear, or
+rather not full enough, in describing America, I was called on to
+supplement, and I had to make several speeches. Of course, as I spoke in
+English, he had to put it into Altrurian for me, and it made the greatest
+excitement. The Altrurians are very lively people, and as full of the
+desire to hear some new things as Paul said the men of Athens were. At
+times they were in a perfect gale of laughter at what we told them about
+America. Afterwards some of the women confessed to me that they liked to
+hear us speaking English together; it sounded like the whistling of birds
+or the shrilling of locusts. But they were perfectly kind, and though
+they laughed it was clear that they laughed at what we were saying, and
+never at us, or at least never at _me_.
+
+Of course there was the greatest curiosity to know what Aristides'
+wife looked like, as well as sounded like; he had written out about
+our engagement before I broke it; and my clothes were of as much
+interest As myself, or more. You know how I had purposely left my latest
+Paris things behind, so as to come as simply as possible to the simple
+life of Altruria, but still with my big leg-of-mutton sleeves, and my
+picture-hat, and my pinched waist, I felt perfectly grotesque, and I have
+no doubt I looked it. They had never seen a lady from the capitalistic
+world before, but only now and then a whaling-captain's wife who had come
+ashore; and I knew they were burning to examine my smart clothes down to
+the last button and bit of braid. I had on the short skirts of last year,
+and I could feel ten thousand eyes fastened on my high-heeled boots,
+which you know _I_ never went to extremes in. I confess my face burned
+a little, to realize what a scarecrow I must look, when I glanced round
+at those Altrurian women, whose pretty, classic fashions made the whole
+place like a field of lilacs and irises, and knew that they were as
+comfortable as they were beautiful. Do you remember some of the
+descriptions of the undergraduate maidens in the “Princess”--I know you
+had it at school--where they are sitting in the palace halls together?
+The effect was something like that.
+
+You may be sure that I got out of my things as soon as I could borrow an
+Altrurian costume, and now my Paris confections are already hung up for
+monuments, as Richard III. says, in the Capitalistic Museum, where people
+from the outlying Regions may come and study them as object-lessons in
+what not to wear. (You remember what you said Aristides told you, when he
+spoke that day at the mountains, about the Regions that Altruria is
+divided into? This is the Maritime Region, and the city where we are
+living for the present is the capital.) You may think this was rather
+hard on me, and at first it did seem pretty intimate, having my things in
+a long glass case, and it gave me a shock to see them, as if it had been
+my ghost, whenever I passed them. But the fact is I was more ashamed than
+hurt--they were so ugly and stupid and useless. I could have borne my
+Paris dress and my picture-hat if it had not been for those ridiculous
+high-heeled, pointed-toe shoes, which the Curatress had stood at the
+bottom of the skirts. They looked the most frantic things you can
+imagine, and the mere sight of them made my poor feet _ache_ in the
+beautiful sandals I am wearing now; when once you have put on sandals you
+say good-bye and good-riddance to shoes. In a single month my feet have
+grown almost a tenth as large again as they were, and my friends here
+encourage me to believe that they will yet measure nearly the classic
+size, though, as you know, I am not in my first youth and can't expect
+them to do miracles.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had to leave off abruptly at the last page because Aristides had come
+in with a piece of news that took my mind off everything else. I am
+afraid you are not going to get this letter even at the late date I had
+set for its reaching you, my dear. It seems that there has been a sort of
+mutiny among the crew of our trader, which was to sail next week, and now
+there is no telling when she will sail. Ever since she came the men have
+been allowed their liberty, as they call it, by watches, but the last
+watch came ashore this week before another watch had returned to the
+ship, and now not one of the sailors will go back. They had been
+exploring the country by turns, at their leisure, it seems, and their
+excuse is that they like Altruria better than America, which they say
+they wish never to see again.
+
+You know (though I didn't, till Aristides explained to me) that in any
+European country the captain in such a case would go to his consul, and
+the consul would go to the police, and the police would run the men down
+and send them back to the ship in irons as deserters, or put them in jail
+till the captain was ready to sail, and then deliver them up to him. But
+it seems that there is no law in Altruria to do anything of the kind; the
+only law here that would touch the case is one which obliges any citizen
+to appear and answer the complaint of any other citizen before the
+Justiciary Assembly. A citizen cannot be imprisoned for anything but the
+rarest offence, like killing a person in a fit of passion; and as to
+seizing upon men who are guilty of nothing worse than wanting to be left
+to the pursuit of happiness, as all the Altrurians are, there is no
+statute and no usage for it. Aristides says that the only thing which can
+be done is to ask the captain and the men to come to the Assembly and
+each state his case. The Altrurians are not anxious to have the men stay,
+not merely because they are coarse, rude, or vicious, but because they
+think they ought to go home and tell the Americans what they have seen
+and heard here, and try and get them to found an Altrurian Commonwealth
+of their own. Still they will not compel them to go, and the magistrates
+do not wish to rouse any sort of sentiment against them. They feel that
+the men are standing on their natural rights, which they could not
+abdicate if they would. I know this will appear perfectly ridiculous
+to Mr. Makely, and I confess myself that there seems something binding in
+a contract which ought to act on the men's consciences, at least.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Well, my dear Dorothea, the hearing before the Assembly is over, and it
+has left us just where it found us, as far as the departure of our trader
+is concerned.
+
+How I wish you could have been there! The hearing lasted three days, and
+I would not have missed a minute of it. As it was, I did not miss a
+syllable, and it was so deeply printed on my mind that I believe I
+could repeat it word for word if I had to. But, in the first place, I
+must try and realize the scene to you. I was once summoned as a witness
+in one of our courts, you remember, and I have never forgotten the horror
+of it: the hot, dirty room, with its foul air, the brutal spectators, the
+policemen stationed among them to keep them in order, the lawyers with
+the plaintiff and defendant seated all at one table, the uncouth
+abruptness of the clerks and janitors, or whatever, the undignified
+magistrate, who looked as if his lunch had made him drowsy, and who
+seemed half asleep, as he slouched in his arm-chair behind his desk.
+Instead of such a setting as this, you must imagine a vast marble
+amphitheatre, larger than the Metropolitan Opera, by three or four times,
+all the gradines overflowing (that is the word for the “liquefaction of
+the clothes” which poured over them), and looking like those Bermudan
+waters where the colors of the rainbow seem dropped around the coast. On
+the platform, or stage, sat the Presidents of the Assembly, and on a tier
+of seats behind and above them, the national Magistrates, who, as this is
+the capital of the republic for the time being, had decided to be present
+at the hearing, because they thought the case so very important. In the
+hollow space, just below (like that where you remember the Chorus stood
+in that Greek play which we saw at Harvard ages ago), were the captain
+and the first-mate on one hand, and the seamen on the other; the
+second-mate, our particular friend, was not there because he never goes
+ashore anywhere, and had chosen to remain with the black cook in charge
+of the ship. The captain's wife would rather have stayed with them, but I
+persuaded her to come to us for the days of the hearing, because the
+captain had somehow thought we were opposed to him, and because I thought
+she ought to be there to encourage him by her presence. She sat next to
+me, in a hat which I wish you could have seen, Dolly, and a dress which
+would have set your teeth on edge; but inside of them I knew she was one
+of the best souls in the world, and I loved her the more for being the
+sight she was among those wonderful Altrurian women.
+
+The weather was perfect, as it nearly always is at this time of
+year--warm, yet fresh, with a sky of that “bleu impossible” of the
+Riviera on the clearest day. Some people had parasols, but they put them
+down as soon as the hearing began, and everybody could see perfectly. You
+would have thought they could not hear so well, but a sort of immense
+sounding-plane was curved behind the stage, so that not a word of the
+testimony on either side was lost to me in English. The Altrurian
+translation was given the second day of the hearing through a megaphone,
+as different in tone from the thing that the man in the Grand Central
+Station bellows the trains through as the _vox-humana_ stop of an organ
+is different from the fog-horn of a light-house. The captain's wife was
+bashful, in her odd American dress, but we had got seats near the
+tribune, rather out of sight, and there was nothing to hinder our
+hearing, like the _frou-frou_ of stiff silks or starched skirts (which
+I am afraid we poor things in America like to make when we move) from the
+soft, filmy tissues that the Altrurian women wear; but I must confess
+that there was a good deal of whispering while the captain and the men
+were telling their stories. But, no one except the interpreters, who were
+taking their testimony down in short-hand, to be translated into
+Altrurian and read at the subsequent hearing, could understand what they
+were saying, and so nobody was disturbed by the murmurs. The whispering
+was mostly near me, where I sat with the captain's wife, for everybody I
+knew got as close as they could and studied my face when they thought
+anything important or significant had been said. They are very quick at
+reading faces here; in fact, a great deal of the conversation is carried
+on in that way, or with the visible speech; and my Altrurian friends knew
+almost as well as I did when the speakers came to an interesting point.
+It was rather embarrassing for me, though, with the poor captain's wife
+at my side, to tell them, in my broken Altrurian, what the men were
+accusing the captain of.
+
+I talk of the men, but it was really only one of them who at first, by
+their common consent, spoke for the rest. He was a middle-aged Yankee,
+and almost the only born American among them, for you know that our
+sailors, nowadays, are of every nationality under the sun--Portuguese,
+Norwegians, Greeks, Italians, Kanucks, and Kanakas, and even Cape Cod
+Indians. He said he guessed his story was the story of most sailors, and
+he had followed the sea his whole life. His story was dreadful, and I
+tried to persuade the captain's wife not to come to the hearing the next
+day, when it was to be read in Altrurian; but she would come. I was
+afraid she would be overwhelmed by the public compassion, and would not
+know what to do; for when something awful that the sailor had said
+against the captain was translated the women, all about us cooed their
+sympathy with her, and pressed her hand if they could, or patted her on
+the shoulder, to show how much they pitied her. In Altruria they pity the
+friends of those who have done wrong, and sometimes even the wrong-doers
+themselves; and it is quite a luxury, for there is so little wrong-doing
+here: I tell them that in America they would have as much pitying to do
+as they could possibly ask. After the hearing that day my friends, who
+were of a good many different Refectories, as we call them here, wanted
+her to go and lunch with them; but I got her quietly home with me, and
+after she had had something to eat I made her lie down awhile.
+
+You won't care to have me go fully into the affair. The sailors'
+spokesman told how he had been born on a farm, where he had shared the
+family drudgery and poverty till he grew old enough to run away. He
+meant to go to sea, but he went first to a factory town and worked three
+or four years in the mills. He never went back to the farm, but he sent a
+little money now and then to his mother; and he stayed on till he got
+into trouble. He did not say just what kind of trouble, but I fancied it
+was some sort of love-trouble; he blamed himself for it; and when he left
+that town to get away from the thought of it, as much as anything, and
+went to work in another town, he took to drink; then, once, in a drunken
+spree, he found himself in New York without knowing how. But it was in
+what he called a sailors' boarding-house, and one morning, after he had
+been drinking overnight “with a very pleasant gentleman,” he found
+himself in the forecastle of a ship bound for Holland, and when the mate
+came and cursed him up and cursed him out he found himself in the
+foretop. I give it partly in his own language, because I cannot help it;
+and I only wish I could give it wholly in his language; it was so graphic
+and so full of queer Yankee humor. From that time on, he said, he had
+followed the sea; and at sea he was always a good temperance man, but
+Altruria was the only place he had ever kept sober ashore. He guessed
+that was partly because there was nothing to drink but unfermented
+grape-juice, and partly because there was nobody to drink with; anyhow,
+he had not had a drop here. Everywhere else, as soon as he left his ship,
+he made for a sailors' boarding-house, and then he did not know much till
+he found himself aboard ship and bound for somewhere that he did not know
+of. He was always, he said, a stolen man, as much as a negro captured on
+the west coast of Africa and sold to a slaver; and, he said, it was a
+slave's life he led between drinks, whether it was a long time or short.
+He said he would ask his mates if it was very different with them, and
+when he turned to them they all shouted back, in their various kinds of
+foreign accents, No, it was just the same with them, every one. Then he
+said that was how he came to ship on our captain's vessel, and though
+they could not all say the same, they nodded confirmation as far as he
+was concerned.
+
+The captain looked sheepish enough at this, but he looked sorrowful, too,
+as if he could have wished it had been different, and he asked the man if
+he had been abused since he came on board. Well, the man said, not unless
+you called tainted salt-horse and weevilly biscuit abuse; and then the
+captain sat down again, and I could feel his poor wife shrinking beside
+me. The man said that he was comparatively well off on the captain's
+ship, and the life was not half such a dog's life as he had led on other
+vessels; but it was such that when he got ashore here in Altruria, and
+saw how _white_ people lived, people that _used_ each other white, he
+made up his mind that he would never go hack to any ship alive. He hated
+a ship so much that if he could go home to America as a first-class
+passenger on a Cunard liner, John D. Rockefeller would not have money
+enough to hire him to do it. He was going to stay in Altruria till he
+died, if they would let him, and he guessed they would, if what he had
+heard about them was true. He just wanted, he said, while we were about
+it, to have a few of his mates tell their experience, not so much on
+board the _Little Sally_, but on shore, and since they could remember;
+and one after another did get up and tell their miserable stories. They
+were like the stories you sometimes read in your paper over your coffee,
+or that you can hear any time you go into the congested districts in New
+York; but I assure you, my dear, they seemed to me perfectly incredible
+here, though I had known hundreds of such stories at home. As I realized
+their facts I forgot where I was; I felt that I was back again in that
+horror, where it sometimes seemed to me I had no right to be fed or
+clothed or warm or clean in the midst of the hunger and cold and
+nakedness and dirt, and where I could only reconcile myself to my comfort
+because I knew my discomfort would not help others' misery.
+
+I can hardly tell how, but even the first day a sense of something
+terrible spread through that multitude of people, to whom the words
+themselves were mere empty sounds. The captain sat through it, with his
+head drooping, till his face was out of sight, and the tears ran silently
+down his wife's cheeks; and the women round me were somehow awed into
+silence. When the men ended, and there seemed to be no one else to say
+anything on that side, the captain jumped to his feet, with a sort of
+ferocious energy, and shouted out, “Are you all through, men?” and their
+spokesman answered, “Ay, ay, sir!” and then the captain flung back his
+grizzled hair and shook his fist towards the sailors. “And do you think I
+_wanted_ to do it? Do you think I _liked_ to do it? Do you think that if
+I hadn't been _afraid_ my whole life long I would have had the _heart_ to
+lead you the dog's life I know I've led you? I've been as poor as the
+poorest of you, and as low down as the lowest; I was born in the town
+poor-house, and I've been so afraid of the poor-house all my days that I
+hain't had, as you may say, a minute's peace. Ask my wife, there, what
+sort of a man I _am_, and whether I'm the man, _really_ the man that's
+been hard and mean to you the way I know I been. It was because I was
+_afraid_, and because a coward is always hard and mean. I been afraid,
+ever since I could remember anything, of coming to want, and I was
+willing to see other men suffer so I could make sure that me and mine
+shouldn't suffer. That's the way we do at home, ain't it? That's in the
+day's work, ain't it? That's playing the game, ain't it, for everybody?
+You can't say it ain't.” He stopped, and the men's spokesman called back,
+“Ay, ay, sir,” as he had done before, and as I had often heard the men do
+when given an order on the ship.
+
+The captain gave a kind of sobbing laugh, and went on in a lower tone.
+“Well, I know you ain't going back. I guess I didn't expect it much from
+the start, and I guess I'm not surprised.” Then he lifted his head and
+shouted, “And do you suppose _I_ want to go back? Don't you suppose _I_
+would like to spend the rest of my days, too, among _white_ people,
+people that _use_ each other white, as you say, and where there ain't
+any want or, what's worse, _fear_ of want? Men! There ain't a day, or an
+hour, or a minute, when I don't think how awful it is over there, where I
+got to be either some man's slave or some man's master, as much so as if
+it was down in the ship's articles. My wife ain't so, because she ain't
+been ashore here. I wouldn't let her; I was afraid to let her see what a
+white man's country really was, because I felt so weak about it myself,
+and I didn't want to put the trial on her, too. And do you know _why_
+we're going back, or want to go? I guess some of you know, but I want to
+tell these folks here so they'll understand, and I want you, Mr. Homos,”
+ he called to my husband, “to get it down straight. It's because we've got
+two little children over there, that we left with their grandmother when
+my wife come with me this voyage because she had lung difficulty and
+wanted to see whether she could get her health back. Nothing else on
+God's green earth could take me back to America, and I guess it couldn't
+my wife if she knew what Altruria was as well as I do. But when I went
+around here and saw how everything was, and remembered how it was at
+home, I just said, 'She'll stay on the ship.' Now, that's all I got to
+say, though I thought I had a lot more. I guess it'll be enough for these
+folks, and they can judge between us.” Then the captain sat down, and to
+make a long story short, the facts of the hearing were repeated in
+Altrurian the next day by megaphone, and when the translation was
+finished there was a general rush for the captain. He plainly expected to
+be lynched, and his wife screamed out, “Oh, don't hurt him! He isn't a
+bad man!” But it was only the Altrurian way with a guilty person: they
+wanted to let him know how sorry they were for him, and since his sin had
+found him out how hopeful they were for his redemption. I had to explain
+it to the sailors as well as to the captain and his wife, but I don't
+believe any of them quite accepted the fact.
+
+The third day of the hearing was for the rendering of the decision, first
+in Altrurian, and then in English. The verdict of the magistrates had to
+be confirmed by a standing vote of the people, and of course the women
+voted as well as the men. The decision was that the sailors should be
+absolutely free to go or stay, but they took into account the fact that
+it would be cruel to keep the captain and his wife away from their little
+ones, and the sailors might wish to consider this. If they still remained
+true to their love of Altruria they could find some means of returning.
+
+When the translator came to this point their spokesman jumped to his feet
+and called out to the captain, “Will you _do_ it?” “Do what?” he asked,
+getting slowly to his own feet. “Come back with us after you have seen
+the kids?” The captain shook his fist at the sailors; it seemed to be the
+only gesture he had with them. “Give me the _chance!_ All I want is to
+see the children and bring them out with me to Altruria, and the old
+folks with them.” “Will you _swear_ it? Will you say, 'I hope I may find
+the kids dead and buried when I get home if I don't do it'?” “I'll take
+that oath, or any oath you want me to.” “Shake hands on it, then.”
+
+The two men met in front of the tribunal and clasped hands there, and
+their reconciliation did not need translation. Such a roar of cheers went
+up! And then the whole assembly burst out in the national Altrurian
+anthem, “Brothers All.” I wish you could have heard it! But when the
+terms of the agreement were explained, the cheering that had gone before
+was a mere whisper to what followed. One orator after another rose and
+praised the self-sacrifice of the sailors. I was the proudest when the
+last of them referred to Aristides and the reports which he had sent home
+from America, and said that without some such study as he had made of
+the American character they never could have understood such an act as
+they were now witnessing. Illogical and insensate as their system was,
+their character sometimes had a beauty, a sublimity which was not
+possible to Altrurians even, for it was performed in the face of risks
+and chances which their happy conditions relieved them from. At the same
+time, the orator wished his hearers to consider the essential immorality
+of the act. He said that civilized men had no right to take these risks
+and chances. The sailors were perhaps justified, in so far as they were
+homeless, wifeless, and childless men; but it must not be forgotten that
+their heroism was like the reckless generosity of savages.
+
+The men have gone back to the ship, and she sails this afternoon. I have
+persuaded the captain to let his wife stay to lunch with me at our
+Refectory, where the ladies wish to bid her good-bye, and I am hurrying
+forward this letter so that she can take it on board with her this
+afternoon. She has promised to post it on the first Pacific steamer they
+meet, or if they do not meet any to send it forward to you with a
+special-delivery stamp as soon as they reach Boston. She will also
+forward by express an Altrurian costume, such as I am now wearing,
+sandals and all! Do put it on, Dolly, dear, for my sake, and realize what
+it is for once in your life to be a _free_ woman.
+
+Heaven knows when I shall have another chance of getting letters to you.
+But I shall live in hopes, and I shall set down my experiences here for
+your benefit, not perhaps as I meet them, but as I think of them, and
+you must not mind having a rather cluttered narrative. To-morrow we are
+setting off on our round of the capitals, where Aristides is to make a
+sort of public report to the people of the different Regions on the
+working of the capitalistic conditions as he observed them among us. But
+I don't expect to send you a continuous narrative of our adventures.
+Good-bye, dearest, with my mother's love, and my husband's as well as my
+own, to both of you; think of me as needing nothing but a glimpse of you
+to complete my happiness. How I should like to tell you fully about it!
+You _must_ come to Altruria!
+
+I came near letting this go without telling you of one curious incident
+of the affair between the captain and his men. Before the men returned to
+the ship they came with their spokesman to say good-bye to Aristides and
+me, and he remarked casually that it was just as well, maybe, to be going
+back, because, for one thing, they would know then whether it was real or
+not. I asked him what he meant, and he said, “Well, you know, some of the
+mates think it's a dream here, or it's too good to be true. As far forth
+as I go, I'd be willing to have it a dream that I didn't ever have to
+wake up from. It ain't any too good to be true for me. Anyway, I'm going
+to get back somehow, and give it another chance to be a fact.” Wasn't
+that charming? It had a real touch of poetry in it, but it was prose that
+followed. I couldn't help asking him whether there had been nothing to
+mar the pleasure of their stay in Altruria, and he answered: “Well, I
+don't know as you could rightly say _mar;_ it hadn't ought to have. You
+see, it was like this. You see, some of the mates wanted to lay off and
+have a regular bange, but that don't seem to be the idea here. After we
+had been ashore a day or two they set us to work at different jobs, or
+wanted to. The mates didn't take hold very lively, and some of 'em didn't
+take hold a bit. But after that went on a couple of days, there wa'n't
+any breakfast one morning, and come noontime there wa'n't any dinner, and
+as far forth as they could make out they had to go to bed without supper.
+Then they called a halt, and tackled one of your head men here that could
+speak some English. He didn't answer them right off the reel, but he
+got out his English Testament and he read 'em a verse that said, 'For
+even when we were with you this we commanded you, that if any one would
+not work neither should he eat.' That kind of fetched 'em, and after
+that there wa'n't any sojerin', well not to speak of. They saw he meant
+business. I guess it did more than any one thing to make 'em think they
+wa'n't dreamin'.”
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+You must not think, Dolly, from anything I have been telling you that the
+Altrurians are ever harsh. Sometimes they cannot realize how things
+really are with us, and how what seems grotesque and hideous to them
+seems charming and beautiful, or at least _chic_, to us. But they are
+wonderfully quick to see when they have hurt you the least, and in the
+little sacrifices I have made of my wardrobe to the cause of general
+knowledge there has not been the least urgence from them. When I now look
+at the things I used to wear, where they have been finally placed in the
+ethnological department of the Museum, along with the Esquiman kyaks
+and the Thlinkeet totems, they seem like things I wore in some
+prehistoric age--
+
+“When wild in woods the noble savage ran.”
+
+Now, am I being unkind? Well, you mustn't mind me, Dolly. You must just
+say, “She _has_ got it bad,” and go on and learn as much about Altruria
+as you can from me. Some of the things were hard to get used to, and at
+first seemed quite impossible. For one thing, there was the matter of
+service, which is dishonorable with us, and honorable with the
+Altrurians: I was a long time getting to understand that, though I knew
+it perfectly well from hearing my husband talk about it in New York. I
+believe he once came pretty near offending you by asking why you did not
+do your own work, or something like that; he has confessed as much, and I
+could not wonder at you in your conditions. Why, when we first went to
+the guest-house, and the pretty young girls who brought in lunch sat down
+at table to eat it with us, I felt the indignation making me hot all
+over. You know how democratic I am, and I did not mind those great,
+splendid boat-girls hugging and kissing me, but I instinctively drew the
+line at cooks and waitresses. In New York, you know, I always tried to be
+kind to my servants, but as for letting one of them sit down in my
+presence, much less sit down at table with me, I never dreamed of such a
+thing in my most democratic moments. Luckily I drew the line subjectively
+here, and later I found that these young ladies were daughters of some of
+the most distinguished men and women on the continent, though you must
+not understand distinction as giving any sort of social primacy; that
+sort of thing is not allowed in Altruria. They had drawn lots with the
+girls in the Regionic school here, and were proud of having won the honor
+of waiting on us. Of course, I needn't say they were what we would have
+felt to be ladies anywhere, and their manners were exquisite, even to
+leaving us alone together as soon as we had finished luncheon. The meal
+itself was something I shall always remember for its delicious cooking of
+the different kinds of mushrooms which took the place of meat, and the
+wonderful salads, and the temperate and tropical fruits which we had for
+dessert.
+
+They had to talk mostly with my husband, of course, and when they did
+talk to me it was through him. They were very intelligent about our
+world, much more than we are about Altruria, though, of course, it was by
+deduction from premises rather than specific information, and they wanted
+to ask a thousand questions; but they saw the joke of it, and laughed
+with us when Aristides put them off with a promise that if they would
+have a public meeting appointed we would appear and answer all the
+questions anybody could think of; we were not going to waste our answers
+on them the first day. He wanted them to let us go out and help wash the
+dishes, but they would not hear of it. I confess I was rather glad of
+that, for it seemed a lower depth to which I could not descend, even
+after eating with them. But they invited us out to look at the kitchen,
+after they had got it in order a little, and when we joined them there,
+whom should I see but my own dear old mother, with an apron up to her
+chin, wiping the glass and watching carefully through her dear old
+spectacles that she got everything bright! You know she was of a simpler
+day than ours, and when she was young she used to do her own work, and
+she and my father always washed the dishes together after they had
+company. I merely said, “_Well_, mother!” and she laughed and colored,
+and said she guessed she should like it in Altruria, for it took her back
+to the America she used to know.
+
+I must mention things as they come into my head, and not in any
+regular order; there are too many of them. One thing is that I did
+not notice till afterwards that we had had no meat that first day at
+luncheon--the mushrooms were so delicious, and you know I never was much
+of a meat-eater. It was not till we began to make our present tour of the
+Regionic capitals, where Aristides has had to repeat his account of
+American civilization until I am sick as well as ashamed of America, that
+I first felt a kind of famine which I kept myself from recognizing as
+long as I could. Then I had to own to myself, long before I owned it to
+him, that I was hungry for _meat_--for roast, for broiled, for fried, for
+hashed. I did not actually tell him, but he found it out, and I could not
+deny it, though I felt such an ogre in it. He was terribly grieved, and
+blamed himself for not having thought of it, and wished he had got some
+canned meats from the trader before she left the port. He was really in
+despair, for nobody since the old capitalistic times had thought of
+killing sheep or cattle for food; they have them for wool and milk and
+butter; and of course when I looked at them in the fields it did seem
+rather formidable. You are so used to seeing them in the butchers' shops,
+ready for the range, that you never think of what they have to _go
+through_ before that. But at last I managed to gasp out, one day, “If I
+could only have a chicken!” and he seemed to think that it could be
+managed. I don't know how he made interest with the authorities, or how
+the authorities prevailed on a farmer to part with one of his precious
+pullets; but the thing was done somehow, and two of the farmer's children
+brought it to us at one of the guest-houses where we were staying, and
+then fled howling. That was bad enough, but what followed was worse. I
+went another day on mushrooms before I had the heart to say chicken again
+and suggest that Aristides should get it killed and dressed. The poor
+fellow did try, I believe, but we had to fall back upon ourselves for the
+murderous deed, and--Did you ever see a chicken have its head cut off,
+and how hideously it behaves? It made us both wish we were dead; and the
+sacrifice of that one pullet was quite enough for me. We buried the poor
+thing under the flowers of the guest-house garden, and I went back to
+my mushrooms after a visit of contrition to the farmer and many attempts
+to bring his children to forgiveness. After all, the Altrurian mushrooms
+are wonderfully nourishing, and they are in such variety that, what with
+other succulent vegetables and the endless range of fruits and nuts, one
+does not wish for meat--meat that one has killed one's self!
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+I wish you could be making tour of the Regionic capitals with us, Dolly!
+There are swift little one-rail electric expresses running daily from one
+capital to another, but these are used only when speed is required, and
+we are confessedly in no hurry: Aristides wanted me to see as much of the
+country as possible, and I am as eager as he. The old steam-roads of the
+capitalistic epoch have been disused for generations, and their beds are
+now the country roads, which are everywhere kept in beautiful repair.
+There are no horse vehicles (the electric motors are employed in the
+towns), though some people travel on horseback, but the favorite means of
+conveyance is by electric van, which any citizen may have on proof of his
+need of it; and it is comfortable beyond compare--mounted on easy
+springs, and curtained and cushioned like those gypsy vans we see in the
+country at home. Aristides drives himself, and sometimes we both get out
+and walk, for there is plenty of time.
+
+I don't know whether I can make you understand how everything has tended
+to simplification here. They have disused the complicated facilities and
+conveniences of the capitalistic epoch, which we are so proud of, and
+have got back as close as possible to nature. People stay at home a great
+deal more than with us, though if any one likes to make a journey or to
+visit the capitals he is quite free to do it, and those who have some
+useful or beautiful object in view make the sacrifice, as they feel it,
+to leave their villages every day and go to the nearest capital to carry
+on their studies or experiments. What we consider modern conveniences
+they would consider a superfluity of naughtiness for the most part. As
+_work_ is the ideal, they do not believe in what we call labor-saving
+devices.
+
+When we approach a village on our journey, one of the villagers,
+sometimes a young man, and sometimes a girl, comes out to meet us, and
+when we pass through they send some one with us on the way a little. The
+people have a perfect inspiration for hospitality: they not only know
+when to do and how much to do, but how little and when not at all. I
+can't remember that we have ever once been bored by those nice young
+things that welcomed us or speeded us on our way, and when we have
+stopped in a village they have shown a genius for leaving us alone, after
+the first welcome, that is beautiful. They are so regardful of our
+privacy, in fact, that if it had not been for Aristides, who explained
+their ideal to me, I should have felt neglected sometimes, and should
+have been shy of letting them know that we would like their company. But
+he understood it, and I must say that I have never enjoyed people and
+their ways so much. Their hospitality is a sort of compromise between
+that of the English houses where you are left free at certain houses to
+follow your own devices absolutely, and that Spanish splendor which
+assures you that the host's house is yours without meaning it. In fact,
+the guest-house, wherever we go, _is_ ours, for it belongs to the
+community, and it is absolutely a home to us for the time being. It is
+usually the best house in the village, the prettiest and cosiest, where
+all the houses are so pretty and cosey. There is always another building
+for public meetings, called the temple, which is the principal edifice,
+marble and classic and tasteful, which we see almost as much of as the
+guest-house, for the news of the Emissary's return has preceded him, and
+everybody is alive with curiosity, and he has to stand and deliver in the
+village temples everywhere. Of course I am the great attraction, and
+after being scared by it at first I have rather got to like it; the
+people are so kind, and unaffected, and really delicate.
+
+You mustn't get the notion that the Altrurians are a solemn people at
+all; they are rather gay, and they like other people's jokes as well as
+their own; I am sure Mr. Makely, with his sense of humor, would be at
+home with them at once. The one thing that more than any other has helped
+them to conceive of the American situation is its being the gigantic joke
+which we often feel it to be; I don't know but it appears to them more
+grotesque than it does to us even. At first, when Aristides would explain
+some peculiarity of ours, they would receive him with a gale of laughing,
+but this might change into cries of horror and pity later. One of the
+things that amused and then revolted them most was our patriotism. They
+thought it the drollest thing in the world that men should be willing to
+give their own lives and take the lives of other men for the sake of a
+country which assured them no safety from want, and did not even assure
+them work, and in which they had no more logical interest than the
+country they were going to fight. They could understand how a rich man
+might volunteer for one of our wars, but when they were told that most of
+our volunteers were poor men, who left their mothers and sisters, or
+their wives and children, without any means of support, except their
+meagre pay, they were quite bewildered and stopped laughing, as if the
+thing had passed a joke. They asked, “How if one of these citizen
+soldiers was killed?” and they seemed to suppose that in this case the
+country would provide for his family and give them work, or if the
+children were too young would support them at the public expense. It
+made me creep a little when my husband answered that the family of a
+crippled or invalided soldier would have a pension of eight or ten or
+fifteen dollars a month; and when they came back with the question why
+the citizens of such a country should love it enough to die for it, I
+could not have said why for the life of me. But Aristides, who is so
+magnificently generous, tried to give them a notion of the sublimity
+which is at the bottom of our illogicality and which adjusts so many
+apparently hopeless points of our anomaly. They asked how this sublimity
+differed from that of the savage who brings in his game and makes a feast
+for the whole tribe, and leaves his wife and children without provision
+against future want; but Aristides told them that there were essential
+differences between the Americans and savages, which arose from the fact
+that the savage condition was permanent and the American conditions were
+unconsciously provisional.
+
+They are quite well informed about our life in some respects, but they
+wished to hear at first hand whether certain things were really so or
+not. For instance, they wanted to know whether people were allowed to
+marry and bring children into the world if they had no hopes of
+supporting them or educating them, or whether diseased people were
+allowed to become parents. In Altruria, you know, the families are
+generally small, only two or three children at the most, so that the
+parents can devote themselves to them the more fully; and as there is no
+fear of want here, the state interferes only when the parents are
+manifestly unfit to bring the little ones up. They imagined that there
+was something of that kind with us, but when they heard that the state
+interfered in the family only when the children were unruly, and then it
+punished the children by sending them to a reform school and disgracing
+them for life, instead of holding the parents accountable, they seemed
+to think that it was one of the most anomalous features of our great
+anomaly. Here, when the father and mother are always quarrelling, the
+children are taken from them, and the pair are separated, at first for a
+time, but after several chances for reform they are parted permanently.
+
+But I must not give you the notion that all our conferences are so
+serious. Many have merely the character of social entertainments, which
+are not made here for invited guests, but for any who choose to come;
+all are welcome. At these there are often plays given by amateurs, and
+improvised from plots which supply the outline, while the performers
+supply the dialogue and action, as in the old Italian comedies. The
+Altrurians are so quick and fine, in fact, that they often remind me of
+the Italians more than any other people. One night there was for my
+benefit an American play, as the Altrurians imagined it from what they
+had read about us, and they had costumed it from the pictures of us they
+had seen in the newspapers Aristides had sent home while he was with us.
+The effect was a good deal like that American play which the Japanese
+company of Sada Yacco gave while it was in New York. It was all about a
+millionaire's daughter, who was loved by a poor young man and escaped
+with him to Altruria in an open boat from New York. The millionaire could
+be distinctly recognized by the dollar-marks which covered him all over,
+as they do in the caricatures of rich men in our yellow journals. It was
+funny to the last degree. In the last act he was seen giving his millions
+away to poor people, whose multitude was represented by the continually
+coming and going of four or five performers in and out of the door, in
+outrageously ragged clothes. The Altrurians have not yet imagined the
+nice degrees of poverty which we have achieved, and they could not have
+understood that a man with a hundred thousand dollars would have seemed
+poor to that multi-millionaire. In fact, they do not grasp the idea of
+money at all. I heard afterwards that in the usual version the
+millionaire commits suicide in despair, but the piece had been given a
+happy ending out of kindness to me. I must say that in spite of the
+monstrous misconception the acting was extremely good, especially that of
+some comic characters.
+
+But dancing is the great national amusement in Altruria, where it has not
+altogether lost its religious nature. A sort of march in the temples is
+as much a part of the worship as singing, and so dancing has been
+preserved from the disgrace which it used to be in with serious people
+among us. In the lovely afternoons you see young people dancing in the
+meadows, and hear them shouting in time to the music, while the older men
+and women watch them from their seats in the shade. Every sort of
+pleasure here is improvised, and as you pass through a village the first
+thing you know the young girls and young men start up in a sort of
+_girandole_, and linking hands in an endless chain stretch the figure
+along through the street and out over the highway to the next village,
+and the next and the next. The work has all been done in the forenoon,
+and every one who chooses is at liberty to join in the fun.
+
+The villages are a good deal alike to a stranger, and we knew what to
+expect there after a while, but the country is perpetually varied, and
+the unexpected is always happening in it. The old railroad-beds, on
+which we travelled, are planted with fruit and nut trees and flowering
+shrubs, and our progress is through a fragrant bower that is practically
+endless, except where it takes the shape of a colonnade near the entrance
+of a village, with vines trained about white pillars, and clusters of
+grapes (which are ripening just now) hanging down. The change in the
+climate created by cutting off the southeastern peninsula and letting in
+the equatorial current, which was begun under the first Altrurian
+president, with an unexpended war-appropriation, and finished for what
+one of the old capitalistic wars used to cost, is something perfectly
+astonishing. Aristides says he told you something about it in his speech
+at the White Mountains, but you would never believe it without the
+evidence of your senses. Whole regions to the southward, which were
+nearest the pole and were sheeted with ice and snow, with the temperature
+and vegetation of Labrador, now have the climate of Italy; and the
+mountains, which used to bear nothing but glaciers, are covered with
+olive orchards and plantations of the delicious coffee which they drink
+here. Aristides says you could have the same results at home--no! _in the
+United States_--by cutting off the western shore of Alaska and letting in
+the Japanese current; and it could be done at the cost of any average
+war.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+But I must not get away from my personal experiences in these
+international statistics. Sometimes, when night overtakes us, we stop
+and camp beside the road, and set about getting our supper of eggs and
+bread and butter and cheese, or the fruits that are ripening all round
+us. Since my experience with that pullet I go meekly mushrooming in
+the fields and pastures; and when I have set the mushrooms stewing over
+an open fire, Aristides makes the coffee, and in a little while we
+have a banquet fit for kings--or for the poor things in every grade below
+them that serve kings, political or financial or industrial. There is
+always water, for it is brought down from the snow-fields of the
+mountains--there is not much rainfall--and carried in little concrete
+channels along the road--side from village to village, something like
+those conduits the Italian peasants use to bring down the water from the
+Maritime Alps to their fields and orchards; and you hear the soft gurgle
+of it the whole night long, and day long, too, whenever you stop. After
+supper we can read awhile by our electric lamp (we tap the current in the
+telephone wires anywhere), or Aristides sacrifices himself to me in a
+lesson of Altrurian grammar. Then we creep back into our van and fall
+asleep with the Southern Cross glittering over our heads. It is perfectly
+safe, though it was a long time before I could imagine the perfect safety
+of it. In a country where there are no thieves, because a thief here
+would not know what to do with his booty, we are secure from human
+molestation, and the land has long been cleared of all sorts of wild
+beasts, without being unpleasantly tamed. It is like England in that, and
+yet it has a touch of the sylvan, which you feel nowhere as you do in our
+dear New England hill country. There was one night, however, when we were
+lured on and on, and did not stop to camp till fairly in the dusk. Then
+we went to sleep without supper, for we had had rather a late lunch and
+were not hungry, and about one o'clock in the morning I was awakened by
+voices speaking Altrurian together. I recognized my husband's voice,
+which is always so kind, but which seemed to have a peculiarly tender and
+compassionate note in it now. The other was lower and of a sadness which
+wrung my heart, though I did not know in the least what the person was
+saying. The talk went on a long time, at first about some matter of
+immediate interest, as I fancied, and then apparently it branched off
+on some topic which seemed to concern the stranger, whoever he was. Then
+it seemed to get more indistinct, as if the stranger were leaving us and
+Aristides were going a little way with him. Presently I heard him coming
+back, and he put his head in at the van curtains, as if to see whether I
+was asleep.
+
+“Well?” I said, and he said how sorry he was for having waked me. “Oh, I
+don't mind,” I said. “Whom were you talking with? He had the saddest
+voice I ever heard. What did he want?”
+
+“Oh, it seems that we are not far from the ruins of one of the old
+capitalistic cities, which have been left for a sort of warning against
+the former conditions, and he wished to caution us against the malarial
+influences from it. I think perhaps we had better push on a little way,
+if you don't mind.”
+
+The moon was shining clearly, and of course I did not mind, and Aristides
+got his hand on the lever, and we were soon getting out of the dangerous
+zone. “I think,” he said, “they ought to abolish that pest-hole. I doubt
+if it serves any good purpose, now, though it has been useful in times
+past as an object-lesson.”
+
+“But who was your unknown friend?” I asked, a great deal more curious
+about him than about the capitalistic ruin.
+
+“Oh, just a poor murderer,” he answered easily, and I shuddered back:
+“A murderer!”
+
+“Yes. He killed his friend some fifteen years ago in a jealous rage, and
+he is pursued by remorse that gives him no peace.”
+
+“And is the remorse his only punishment?” I asked, rather indignantly.
+
+“Isn't that enough? God seemed to think it was, in the case of the first
+murderer, who killed his brother. All that he did to Cain was to set a
+mark on him. But we have not felt sure that we have the right to do this.
+We let God mark him, and He has done it with this man in the sorrow of
+his face. I was rather glad you, couldn't see him, my dear. It is an
+awful face.”
+
+I confess that this sounded like mere sentimentalism to me, and I said,
+“Really, Aristides, I can't follow you. How are innocent people to be
+protected against this wretch, if he wanders about among them at will?”
+
+“They are as safe from him as from any other man in Altruria. His case
+was carefully looked into by the medical authorities, and it was decided
+that he was perfectly sane, so that he could be safely left at large, to
+expiate his misdeed in the only possible way that such a misdeed can be
+expiated--by doing good to others. What would you have had us do with
+him?”
+
+The question rather staggered me, but I said, “He ought to have been
+imprisoned at least a year for manslaughter.”
+
+“Cain was not imprisoned an hour.”
+
+“That was a very different thing. But suppose you let a man go at large
+who has killed his friend in a jealous rage, what do you do with other
+murderers?”
+
+“In Altruria there can be no other murderers. People cannot kill here for
+money, which prompts every other kind of murder in capitalistic
+countries, as well as every other kind of crime. I know, my dear, that
+this seems very strange to you, but you will accustom yourself to the
+idea, and then you will see the reasonableness of the Altrurian plan. On
+the whole, I am sorry you could not have seen that hapless man, and
+heard him. He had a face like death--”
+
+“And a voice like death, too!” I put in.
+
+“You noticed that? He wanted to talk about his crime with me. He wants to
+talk about it with any one who will listen to him. He is consumed with an
+undying pity for the man he slew. That is the first thing, the only
+thing, in his mind. If he could, I believe he would give his life for the
+life he took at any moment. But you cannot recreate one life by
+destroying another. There is no human means of ascertaining justice, but
+we can always do mercy with divine omniscience.” As he spoke the sun
+pierced the edge of the eastern horizon, and lit up the marble walls and
+roofs of the Regionic capital which we were approaching.
+
+At the meeting we had there in the afternoon, Aristides reported our
+having been warned against our danger in the night by that murderer, and
+public record of the fact was made. The Altrurians consider any sort of
+punishment which is not expiation a far greater sin than the wrong it
+visits, and altogether barren and useless. After the record in this case
+had been made, the conference naturally turned upon what Aristides had
+seen of the treatment of criminals in America, and when, he told of our
+prisons, where people merely arrested and not yet openly accused are
+kept, I did not know which way to look, for you know I am still an
+American at heart, Dolly. Did you ever see the inside of one of our
+police-stations at night? Or smell it? I did, once, when I went to give
+bail for a wretched girl who had been my servant, and had gone wrong, but
+had been arrested for theft, and I assure you that the sight and the
+smell woke me in the night for a month afterwards, and I have never quite
+ceased to dream about it.
+
+The Altrurians listened in silence, and I hoped they could not realize
+the facts, though the story was every word true; but what seemed to make
+them the most indignant was the treatment of the families of the
+prisoners in what we call our penitentiaries and reformatories. At first
+they did not conceive of it, apparently, because it was so stupidly
+barbarous; they have no patience with stupidity; and when Aristides had
+carefully explained, it seemed as if they could not believe it. They
+thought it right that the convicts should be made to work, but they could
+not understand that the state really took away their wages, and left
+their families to suffer for want of the support which it had deprived
+them of. They said this was punishing the mothers and sisters, the wives
+and children of the prisoners, and was like putting out the eyes of an
+offender's innocent relatives as they had read was done in Oriental
+countries. They asked if there was never any sort of protest against such
+an atrocious perversion of justice, and when the question was put to me
+I was obliged to own that I had never heard the system even criticised.
+Perhaps it has been, but I spoke only from my own knowledge.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+Well, to get away from these dismal experiences, and come back to our
+travels, with their perpetual novelty, and the constantly varying beauty
+of the country!
+
+The human interest of the landscape, that is always the great interest of
+it, and I wish I could make you feel it as I have felt it in this
+wonderful journey of ours. It is like the New England landscape at times,
+in its kind of gentle wildness, but where it has been taken back into the
+hand of man, how different the human interest is! Instead of a rheumatic
+old farmer, in his clumsy clothes, with some of his gaunt girls to help
+him, or perhaps his ageing wife, getting in the hay of one of those sweet
+meadows, and looking like so many animated scarecrows at their work; or
+instead of some young farmer, on the seat of his clattering mower, or
+mounted high over his tedder, but as much alone as if there were no one
+else in the neighborhood, silent and dull, or fierce or sullen, as the
+case might be, the work is always going on with companies of mowers or
+reapers, or planters, that chatter like birds or sing like them.
+
+It is no use my explaining again and again that in a country like this,
+where everybody works, nobody over works, and that when the few hours of
+obligatory labor are passed in the mornings, people need not do anything
+unless they choose. Their working-dresses are very simple, but in all
+sorts of gay colors, like those you saw in the Greek play at Harvard,
+with straw hats for the men, and fillets of ribbon for the girls, and
+sandals for both. I speak of girls, for most of the married women are at
+home gardening, or about the household work, but men of every age work in
+the fields. The earth is dear to them because they get their life from it
+by labor that is not slavery; they come to love it every acre, every
+foot, because they have known it from childhood; and I have seen old men,
+very old, pottering about the orchards and meadows during the hours of
+voluntary work, and trimming them up here and there, simply because they
+could not keep away from the place, or keep their hands off the trees and
+bushes. Sometimes in the long, tender afternoons, we see far up on some
+pasture slope, groups of girls scattered about on the grass, with their
+sewing, or listening to some one reading. Other times they are giving a
+little play, usually a comedy, for life is so happy here that tragedy
+would not be true to it, with the characters coming and going in a grove
+of small pines, for the _coulisses_, and using a level of grass for the
+stage. If we stop, one of the audience comes down to us and invites us to
+come up and see the play, which keeps on in spite of the sensation that I
+can feel I make among them.
+
+Everywhere the news of us has gone before us, and there is a universal
+curiosity to get a look at Aristides' capitalistic wife, as they call me.
+I made him translate it, and he explained that the word was merely
+descriptive and not characteristic; some people distinguished and called
+me American. There was one place where they were having a picnic in the
+woods up a hillside, and they asked us to join them, so we turned our
+van into the roadside and followed the procession. It was headed by two
+old men playing on pipes, and after these came children singing, and then
+all sorts of people, young and old. When we got to an open place in the
+woods, where there was a spring, and smooth grass, they built fires, and
+began to get ready for the feast, while some of them did things to amuse
+the rest. Every one could do something; if you can imagine a party of
+artists, it was something like that. I should say the Altrurians had
+artists' manners, free, friendly, and easy, with a dash of humor in
+everything, and a wonderful willingness to laugh and make laugh.
+Aristides is always explaining that the artist is their ideal type; that
+is, some one who works gladly, and plays as gladly as he works; no one
+here is asked to do work that he hates, unless he seems to hate every
+kind of work. When this happens, the authorities find out something for
+him that he had _better_ like, by letting him starve till he works. That
+picnic lasted the whole afternoon and well into the night, and then the
+picnickers went home through the starlight, leading the little ones, or
+carrying them when they were too little or too tired. But first they came
+down to our van with us, and sang us a serenade after we had disappeared
+into it, and then left us, and sent their voices back to us out of the
+dark.
+
+One morning at dawn, as we came into a village, we saw nearly the whole
+population mounting the marble steps of the temple, all the holiday dress
+of the Voluntaries, which they put on here every afternoon when the work
+is done. Last of the throng came a procession of children, looking
+something like a May-Day party, and midway of their line were a young man
+and a young girl, hand in hand, who parted at the door of the temple, and
+entered separately. Aristides called out, “Oh, it is a wedding! You are
+in luck, Eveleth,” and then and there I saw my first Altrurian wedding.
+
+Within, the pillars and the altar and the seats of the elders were
+garlanded with flowers, so fresh and fragrant that they seemed to have
+blossomed from the marble overnight, and there was a soft murmur of
+Altrurian voices that might very well have seemed the hum of bees among
+the blossoms. This subsided, as the young couple, who had paused just
+inside the temple door, came up the middle side by side, and again
+separated and took their places, the youth on the extreme right of the
+elder, and the maiden on the extreme left of the eldresses, and stood
+facing the congregation, which was also on foot, and joined in the hymn
+which everybody sang. Then one of the eldresses rose and began a sort of
+statement which Aristides translated to me afterwards. She said that the
+young couple whom we saw there had for the third time asked to become man
+and wife, after having believed for a year that they loved each other,
+and having statedly come before the marriage authorities and been
+questioned as to the continuance of their affection. She said that
+probably every one present knew that they had been friends from
+childhood, and none would be surprised that they now wished to be united
+for life. They had been carefully instructed as to the serious nature of
+the marriage bond, and admonished as to the duties they were entering
+into, not only to each other, but to the community. At each successive
+visit to the authorities they had been warned, separately and together,
+against the danger of trusting to anything like a romantic impulse, and
+they had faithfully endeavored to act upon this advice, as they
+testified. In order to prove the reality of their affection, they had
+been parted every third month, and had lived during that time in
+different Regions where it was meant they should meet many other young
+people, so that if they felt any swerving of the heart they might not
+persist in an intention which could only bring them final unhappiness. It
+seems this is the rule in the case of young lovers, and people usually
+marry very young here, but if they wish to marry later in life the rule
+is not enforced so stringently, or not at all. The bride and groom we saw
+had both stood these trials, and at each return they had been more and
+more sure that they loved each other, and loved no one else. Now they
+were here to unite their hands, and to declare the union of their hearts
+before the people.
+
+Then the eldress sat down and an elder arose, who bade the young people
+come forward to the centre of the line, where the elders and eldresses
+were sitting. He took his place behind them, and once more and for the
+last time he conjured them not to persist if they felt any doubt of
+themselves. He warned them that if they entered into the married state,
+and afterwards repented to the point of seeking divorce, the divorce
+would indeed be granted them, but on terms, as they must realize, of
+lasting grief to themselves through the offence they would commit against
+the commonwealth. They answered that they were sure of themselves, and
+ready to exchange their troth for life and death. Then they joined hands,
+and declared that they took each other for husband and wife. The
+congregation broke into another hymn and slowly dispersed, leaving the
+bride and groom with their families, who came up to them and embraced
+them, pressing their cheeks against the cheeks of the young pair.
+
+This ended the solemnity, and then the festivity began, as it ended, with
+a wedding feast, where people sang and danced and made speeches and drank
+toasts, and the fun was kept up till the hours of the Obligatories
+approached; and then, what do you think? The married pair put off their
+wedding garments with the rest and went to work in the fields! Later,
+I understood, if they wished to take a wedding journey they could freely
+do so; but the first thing in their married life they must honor the
+Altrurian ideal of work, by which every one must live in order that
+every other may live without overwork. I believe that the marriage
+ceremonial is something like that of the Quakers, but I never saw a
+Quaker wedding, and I could only compare this with the crazy romps with
+which our house-weddings often end, with throwing of rice and old shoes,
+and tying ribbons to the bridal carriage and baggage, and following the
+pair to the train with outbreaks of tiresome hilarity, which make them
+conspicuous before their fellow-travellers; or with some of our ghastly
+church weddings, in which the religious ceremonial is lost in the social
+effect, and ends with that everlasting thumping march from “Lohengrin,”
+ and the outsiders storming about the bridal pair and the guests with the
+rude curiosity that the fattest policemen at the canopied and carpeted
+entrance cannot check.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+We have since been at other weddings and at christenings and at funerals.
+The ceremonies are always held in the temples, and are always in the same
+serious spirit. As the Altrurians are steadfast believers in immortality,
+there is a kind of solemn elevation in the funeral ceremonies which I
+cannot give you a real notion of. It is helped, I think, by the custom of
+not performing the ceremony over the dead; a brief rite is reserved for
+the cemetery, where it is wished that the kindred shall not be present,
+lest they think always of the material body and not of the spiritual body
+which shall be raised in incorruption. Religious service is held in the
+temples every day at the end of the Obligatories, and whenever we are
+near a village or in any of the capitals we always go. It is very simple.
+After a hymn, to which the people sometimes march round the interior of
+the temple, each lays on the altar an offering from the fields or woods
+where they have been working, if it is nothing but a head of grain or a
+wild flower or a leaf. Then any one is at liberty to speak, but any one
+else may go out without offence. There is no ritual; sometimes they read
+a chapter from the New Testament, preferably a part of the story of
+Christ or a passage from His discourses. The idea of coming to the temple
+at the end of the day's labor is to consecrate that day's work, and they
+do not call anything work that is not work with the hands. When I
+explained, or tried to explain, that among us a great many people worked
+with their brains, to amuse others or to get handwork out of them, they
+were unable to follow me. I asked if they did not consider composing
+music or poetry or plays, or painting pictures work, and they said, No,
+that was pleasure, and must be indulged only during the Voluntaries; it
+was never to be honored like work with the hands, for it would not
+equalize the burden of that, but might put an undue share of it on
+others. They said that lives devoted to such pursuits must be very
+unwholesome, and they brought me to book about the lives of most artists,
+literary men, and financiers in the capitalistic world to prove what they
+said. They held that people must work with their hands willingly, in the
+artistic spirit, but they could only do that when they knew that others
+differently gifted were working in like manner with their hands.
+
+I couldn't begin to tell you all our queer experiences. As I have kept
+saying, I am a great curiosity everywhere, and I could flatter myself
+that people were more eager to see me than to hear Aristides. Sometimes I
+couldn't help thinking that they expected to find me an awful warning, a
+dreadful example of whatever a woman ought not to be, and a woman from
+capitalistic conditions must be logically. But sometimes they were very
+intelligent, even the simplest villagers, as we should call them, though
+there is such an equality of education and opportunity here that no
+simplicity of life has the effect of dulling people as it has with us.
+One thing was quite American: they always wanted to know how I liked
+Altruria, and when I told them, as I sincerely could, that I adored it,
+they were quite affecting in their pleasure. They generally asked if I
+would like to go back to America, and when I said No, they were delighted
+beyond anything. They said I must become a citizen and vote and take part
+in the government, for that was every woman's duty as well as right; it
+was wrong to leave the whole responsibility to the men. They asked if
+American women took no interest in the government, and when I told them
+there was a very small number who wished to influence politics socially,
+as the Englishwomen did, but without voting or taking any responsibility,
+they were shocked. In one of the Regionic capitals they wanted me to
+speak after Aristides, but I had nothing prepared; at the next I did get
+off a little speech in English, which he translated after me. Later he
+put it into Altrurian, and I memorized it, and made myself immensely
+popular by parroting it.
+
+The pronunciation of Altrurian is not difficult, for it is spelled
+phonetically, and the sounds are very simple. Where they were once
+difficult they have been simplified, for here the simplification of life
+extends to everything; and the grammar has been reduced in its structure
+till it is as elemental as English grammar or Norwegian. The language is
+Greek in origin, but the intricate inflections and the declensions have
+been thrown away, and it has kept only the simplest forms. You must get
+Mr. Twelvemough to explain this to you, Dolly, for it would take me too
+long, and I have so much else to tell you. A good many of the women have
+taken up English, but they learn it as a dead language, and they give it
+a comical effect by trying to pronounce it as it is spelled.
+
+I suppose you are anxious, if these letters which are piling up and
+piling up should ever reach you, or even start to do so, to know
+something about the Altrurian cities, and what they are like. Well, in
+the first place, you must cast all images of American cities out of your
+mind, or any European cities, except, perhaps, the prettiest and
+stateliest parts of Paris, where there is a regular sky-line, and the
+public buildings and monuments are approached through shaded avenues.
+There are no private houses here, in our sense--that is, houses which
+people have built with their own money on their own land, and made as
+ugly outside and as molestive to their neighbors and the passers-by as
+they chose. As the buildings belong to the whole people, the first
+requirement is that they shall be beautiful inside and out. There are a
+few grand edifices looking like Greek temples, which are used for the
+government offices, and these are, of course, the most dignified, but the
+dwellings are quite as attractive and comfortable. They are built round
+courts, with gardens and flowers in the courts, and wide grassy spaces
+round them. They are rather tall, but never so tall as our great hotels
+or apartment-houses, and the floors are brought to one level by
+elevators, which are used only in the capitals; and, generally speaking,
+I should say the villages were pleasanter than the cities. In fact, the
+village is the Altrurian ideal, and there is an effort everywhere to
+reduce the size of the towns and increase the number of the villages.
+The outlying farms have been gathered into these, and now there is not
+one of those lonely places in the country, like those where our farmers
+toil alone outdoors and their wives alone indoors, and both go mad
+so often in the solitude. The villages are almost in sight of each other,
+and the people go to their fields in company, while the women carry on
+their house-keeping co-operatively, with a large kitchen which they
+use in common; they have their meals apart or together, as they like. If
+any one is sick or disabled the neighbors come in and help do her work,
+as they used with us in the early times, and as they still do in country
+places. Village life here is preferred, just as country life is in
+England, and one thing that will amuse you, with your American ideas, and
+your pride in the overgrowth of our cities: the Altrurian papers solemnly
+announce from time to time that the population of such or such a capital
+has been reduced so many hundreds or thousands since the last census.
+That means that the villages in the neighborhood have been increased in
+number and population.
+
+Meanwhile, I must say the capitals are delightful: clean, airy, quiet,
+with the most beautiful architecture, mostly classic and mostly marble,
+with rivers running through them and round them, and every real
+convenience, but not a clutter of artificial conveniences, as with us. In
+the streets there are noiseless trolleys (where they have not been
+replaced by public automobiles) which the long distances of the ample
+ground-plan make rather necessary, and the rivers are shot over with
+swift motor-boats; for the short distances you always expect to walk, or
+if you don't expect it, you walk anyway. The car-lines and boat-lines are
+public, and they are free, for the Altrurians think that the community
+owes transportation to every one who lives beyond easy reach of the
+points which their work calls them to.
+
+Of course the great government stores are in the capitals, and
+practically there are no stores in the villages, except for what you
+might call emergency supplies. But you must not imagine, Dolly, that
+shopping, here, is like shopping at home--or in America, as I am learning
+to say, for Altruria is home now. That is, you don't fill your purse with
+bank-notes, or have things charged. You get everything you want, within
+reason, and certainly everything you need, for nothing. You have only to
+provide yourself with a card, something like that you have to show at the
+Army and Navy Stores in London, when you first go to buy there, which
+certifies that you belong to this or that working-phalanx, and that you
+have not failed in the Obligatories for such and such a length of time.
+If you are not entitled to this card, you had better not go shopping, for
+there is no possible equivalent for it which will enable you to carry
+anything away or have it sent to your house. At first I could not help
+feeling rather indignant when I was asked to show my work-card in the
+stores; I had usually forgotten to bring it, or sometimes I had brought
+my husband's card, which would not do at all, unless I could say that I
+had been ill or disabled, for a woman is expected to work quite the same
+as a man. Of course her housework counts, and as we are on a sort of
+public mission, they count our hours of travel as working-hours,
+especially as Aristides has made it a point of good citizenship for us to
+stop every now and then and join in the Obligatories when the villagers
+were getting in the farm crops or quarrying stone or putting up a house.
+I am never much use in quarrying or building, but I come in strong in the
+hay-fields or the apple orchards or the orange groves.
+
+The shopping here is not so enslaving as it is with us--I mean, with
+you--because the fashions do not change, and you get things only when you
+need them, not when you want them, or when other people think you do. The
+costume was fixed long ago, when the Altrurian era began, by a commission
+of artists, and it would be considered very bad form as well as bad
+morals to try changing it in the least. People are allowed to choose
+their own colors, but if one goes very wrong, or so far wrong as to
+offend the public taste, she is gently admonished by the local art
+commission. If she insists, they let her have her own way, but she seldom
+wants it when she knows that people think her a fright. Of course the
+costume is modified somewhat for the age and shape of the wearer, but
+this is not so often as you might think. There are no very lean or very
+stout people, though there are old and young, just as there are with us.
+But the Altrurians keep young very much longer than capitalistic peoples
+do, and the life of work keeps down their weight. You know I used to
+incline a little to over-plumpness, I really believe because I overate at
+times simply to keep from thinking of the poor who had to undereat, but
+that is quite past now; I have lost at least twenty-five pounds from
+working out-doors and travelling so much and living very, very simply.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+I have to jot things down as they come into my mind, and I am afraid I
+forget some of the most important. Everybody is so novel on this famous
+tour of ours that I am continually interested, but one has one's
+preferences even in Altruria, and I believe I like best the wives of the
+artists and literary men whom one finds working in the galleries and
+libraries of the capitals everywhere. They are not more intelligent than
+other women, perhaps, but they are more sympathetic; and one sees so
+little of those people in New York, for all they abound there.
+
+The galleries are not only for the exhibition of pictures, but each has
+numbers of ateliers, where the artists work and teach. The libraries are
+the most wonderfully imagined things. You do not have to come and study
+in them, but if you are working up any particular subject, the books
+relating to it are sent to your dwelling every morning and brought away
+every noon, so that during the obligatory hours you have them completely
+at your disposition, and during the Voluntaries you can consult them with
+the rest of the public in the library; it is not thought best that study
+should be carried on throughout the day, and the results seem to justify
+this theory. If you want to read a book merely for pleasure, you are
+allowed to take it out and live with it as long as you like; the copy you
+have is immediately replaced with another, so that you do not feel
+hurried and are not obliged to ramp through it in a week or a fortnight.
+
+The Altrurian books are still rather sealed books to me, but they are
+delightful to the eye, all in large print on wide margins, with flexible
+bindings, and such light paper that you can hold them in one hand
+indefinitely without tiring. I must send you some with this, if I ever
+get my bundle of letters off to you. You will see by the dates that I am
+writing you one every day; I had thought of keeping a journal for you,
+but then I should have had left out a good many things that happened
+during our first days, when the impressions were so vivid, and I should
+have got to addressing my records to myself, and I think I had better
+keep to the form of letters. If they reach you, and you read them at
+random, why that is very much the way I write them.
+
+I despair of giving you any real notion of the capitals, but if you
+remember the White City at the Columbian Fair at Chicago in 1893, you can
+have some idea of the general effect of one; only there is nothing
+heterogeneous in their beauty. There is one classic rule in the
+architecture, but each of the different architects may characterize an
+edifice from himself, just as different authors writing the same language
+characterize it by the diction natural to him. There are suggestions of
+the capitals in some of our cities, and if you remember Commonwealth
+Avenue in Boston, you can imagine something like the union of street and
+garden which every street of them is. The trolleys run under the
+overarching trees between the lawns, flanked by gravelled footpaths
+between flower-beds, and you take the cars or not as you like. As there
+is no hurry, they go about as fast as English trams, and the clanger from
+them is practically reduced to nothing by the crossings dipping under
+them at the street corners. The centre of the capital is approached by
+colonnades, which at night bear groups of great bulbous lamps, and by day
+flutter with the Altrurian and Regionic flags. Around this centre are the
+stores and restaurants and theatres, and galleries and libraries, with
+arcades over the sidewalks, like those in Bologna; sometimes the arcades
+are in two stories, as they are in Chester. People are constantly coming
+and going in an easy way during the afternoon, though in the morning the
+streets are rather deserted.
+
+But what is the use? I could go on describing and describing, and never
+get in half the differences from American cities, with their hideous
+uproar, and their mud in the wet, and their clouds of swirling dust in
+the wind. But there is one feature which I must mention, because you can
+fancy it from the fond dream of a great national highway which some of
+our architects projected while they were still in the fervor of
+excitement from the beauty of the Peristyle, and other features of the
+White City. They really have such a highway here, crossing the whole
+Altrurian continent, and uniting the circle of the Regionic capitals. As
+we travelled for a long time by the country roads on the beds of the old
+railways, I had no idea of this magnificent avenue, till one day my
+husband suddenly ran our van into the one leading up to the first capital
+we were to visit. Then I found myself between miles and miles of stately
+white pillars, rising and sinking as the road found its natural levels,
+and growing in the perspective before us and dwindling behind us. I could
+not keep out of my mind a colonnade of palm-trees, only the fronds were
+lacking, and there were never palms so beautiful. Each pillar was
+inscribed with the name of some Altrurian who had done something for his
+country, written some beautiful poem or story, or history, made some
+scientific discovery, composed an opera, invented a universal
+convenience, performed a wonderful cure, or been a delightful singer, or
+orator, or gardener, or farmer. Not one soldier, general or admiral,
+among them! That seemed very strange to me, and I asked Aristides how
+it was. Like everything else in Altruria, it was very simple; there had
+been no war for so long that there were no famous soldiers to
+commemorate. But he stopped our van when he came to the first of the many
+arches which spanned the highway, and read out to me in English the
+Altrurian record that it was erected in honor of the first President of
+the Altrurian Commonwealth, who managed the negotiations when the
+capitalistic oligarchies to the north and south were peacefully annexed,
+and the descendants of the three nations joined in the commemoration of
+an event that abolished war forever on the Altrurian continent.
+
+Here I can imagine Mr. Makely asking who footed the bills for this beauty
+and magnificence, and whether these works were constructed at the cost of
+the nation, or the different Regions, or the abuttors on the different
+highways. But the fact is, you poor, capitalistic dears, they cost nobody
+a dollar, for there is not a dollar in Altruria. You must worry into the
+idea somehow that in Altruria you cannot buy anything except by working,
+and that work is the current coin of the republic: you pay for everything
+by drops of sweat, and off your own brow, not somebody else's brow. The
+people built these monuments and colonnades, and aqueducts and highways
+and byways, and sweet villages and palatial cities with their own hands,
+after the designs of artists, who also took part in the labor. But it was
+a labor that they delighted in so much that they chose to perform it
+during the Voluntaries, when they might have been resting, and not during
+the Obligatories, when they were required to work. So it was all joy and
+all glory. They say there never was such happiness in any country since
+the world began. While the work went on it was like a perpetual Fourth of
+July or an everlasting picnic.
+
+But I know you hate this sort of economical stuff, Dolly, and I will make
+haste to get down to business, as Mr. Makely would say, for I am really
+coming to something that you will think worth while. One morning, when we
+had made half the circle of the capitals, and were on the homestretch to
+the one where we had left our dear mother--for Aristides claims her,
+too--and I was letting that dull nether anxiety for her come to the top,
+though we had had the fullest telephonic talks with her every day, and
+knew she was well and happy, we came round the shoulder of a wooded cliff
+and found ourselves on an open stretch of the northern coast. At first I
+could only exclaim at the beauty of the sea, lying blue and still beyond
+a long beach closed by another headland, and I did not realize that a
+large yacht which I saw close to land had gone ashore. The beach was
+crowded with Altrurians, who seemed to have come to the rescue, for they
+were putting off to the yacht in boats and returning with passengers, and
+jumping out, and pulling their boats with them up on to the sand.
+
+I was quite bewildered, and I don't know what to say I was the next
+thing, when I saw that the stranded yacht was flying the American flag
+from her peak. I supposed she must be one of our cruisers, she was so
+large, and the first thing that flashed into my mind was a kind of amused
+wonder what those poor Altrurians would do with a ship-of-war and her
+marines and crew. I couldn't ask any coherent questions, and luckily
+Aristides was answering my incoherent ones in the best possible way by
+wheeling our van down on the beach and making for the point nearest the
+yacht. He had time to say he did not believe she was a government vessel,
+and, in fact, I remembered that once I had seen a boat in the North River
+getting up steam to go to Europe which was much larger, and had her decks
+covered with sailors that I took for bluejackets; but she was only the
+private yacht of some people I knew. These stupid things kept going and
+coming in my mind while my husband was talking with some of the
+Altrurian girls who were there helping with the men. They said that the
+yacht had gone ashore the night before last in one of the sudden fogs
+that come up on that coast, and that some people whom the sailors seemed
+to obey were camping on the edge of the upland above the beach, under a
+large tent they had brought from the yacht. They had refused to go to the
+guest-house in the nearest village, and as nearly as the girls could make
+out they expected the yacht to get afloat from tide to tide, and then
+intended to re-embark on her. In the mean time they had provisioned
+themselves from the ship, and were living in a strange way of their own.
+Some of them seemed to serve the others, but these appeared to be used
+with a very ungrateful indifference, as if they were of a different race.
+There was one who wore a white apron and white cap who directed the
+cooking for the rest, and had several assistants; and from time to time
+very disagreeable odors came from the camp, like burning flesh. The
+Altrurians had carried them fruits and vegetables, but the men-assistants
+had refused them contemptuously and seemed suspicious of the variety of
+mushrooms they offered them. They called out, “To-stoo!” and I understood
+that the strangers were afraid they were bringing toad-stools. One of the
+Altrurian girls had been studying English in the nearest capital, and she
+had tried to talk with these people, pronouncing it in the Altrurian way,
+but they could make nothing of one another; then she wrote down what she
+wanted to say, but as she spelled it phonetically they were not able to
+read her English. She asked us if I was the American Altrurian she had
+heard of, and when I said yes she lost no time in showing us to the camp
+of the castaways.
+
+As soon as we saw their tents we went forward till we were met at
+the largest by a sort of marine footman, who bowed slightly and said
+to me, “What name shall I say, ma'am?” and I answered distinctly, so
+that he might get the name right, “Mr. and Mrs. Homos.” Then he held
+back the flap of the marquee, which seemed to serve these people as a
+drawing-room, and called out, standing very rigidly upright, to let us
+pass, in the way that I remembered so well, “Mr. And Mrs. 'Omos!” and a
+severe-looking, rather elderly lady rose to meet us with an air that was
+both anxious and forbidding, and before she said anything else she burst
+out, “You don't mean to say you speak English?”
+
+I said that I spoke English, and had not spoken anything else but rather
+poor French until six months before, and then she demanded, “Have you
+been cast away on this outlandish place, too?”
+
+I laughed and said I lived here, and I introduced my husband as well as I
+could without knowing her name. He explained with his pretty Altrurian
+accent, which you used to like so much, that we had ventured to come in
+the hope of being of use to them, and added some regrets for their
+misfortune so sweetly that I wondered she could help responding in kind.
+But she merely said, “Oh!” and then she seemed to recollect herself, and
+frowning to a very gentle-looking old man to come forward, she ignored my
+husband in presenting me. “Mr. Thrall, Mrs. ----”
+
+She hesitated for my name, and I supplied it, “Homos,” and as the old man
+had put out his hand in a kindly way I took it.
+
+“And this is my husband, Aristides Homos, an Altrurian,” I said, and
+then, as the lady had not asked us to sit down, or shown the least sign
+of liking our being there, the natural woman flamed up in me as she
+hadn't in all the time I have been away from New York. “I am glad you are
+so comfortable here, Mr. Thrall. You won't need us, I see. The people
+about will do anything in their power for you. Come, my dear,” and I was
+sweeping out of that tent in a manner calculated to give the eminent
+millionaire's wife a notion of Altrurian hauteur which I must own would
+have been altogether mistaken.
+
+I knew who they were perfectly. Even if I had not once met them I should
+have known that they were the ultra-rich Thralls, from the multitudinous
+pictures of them that I had seen in the papers at home, not long after
+they came on to New York.
+
+He was beginning, “Oh no, oh no,” but I cut in. “My husband and I are on
+our way to the next Regionic capital, and we are somewhat hurried. You
+will be quite well looked after by the neighbors here, and I see that we
+are rather in your housekeeper's way.”
+
+It _was_ nasty, Dolly, and I won't deny it; it was _vulgar_. But what
+would _you_ have done? I could feel Aristides' mild eye sadly on me, and
+I was sorry for him, but I assure him I was not sorry for them, till that
+old man spoke again, so timidly: “It isn't my--it's my wife, Mrs. Homos.
+Let me introduce her. But haven't we met before?”
+
+“Perhaps during my first husband's lifetime. I was Mrs. Bellington
+Strange.”
+
+“Mrs. P. Bellington Strange? Your husband was a dear friend of mine when
+we were both young--a good man, if ever there was one; the best in the
+world! I am so glad to see you again. Ah--my dear, you remember my
+speaking of Mrs. Strange?”
+
+He took my hand again and held it in his soft old hands, as if hesitating
+whether to transfer it to her, and my heart melted towards him. You may
+think it very odd, Dolly, but it was what he said of my dear, dead
+husband that softened me. It made him seem very fatherly, and I felt the
+affection for him that I felt for my husband, when he seemed more like a
+father. Aristides and I often talk of it, and he has no wish that I
+should forget him.
+
+Mrs. Thrall made no motion to take my hand from him, but she said, “I
+think I have met Mr. Strange,” and now I saw in the background, sitting
+on a camp-stool near a long, lank young man stretched in a hammock, a
+very handsome girl, who hastily ran through a book, and then dropped it
+at the third mention of my name. I suspected that the book was the Social
+Register, and that the girl's search for me had been satisfactory, for
+she rose and came vaguely towards us, while the young man unfolded
+himself from the hammock, and stood hesitating, but looking as if he
+rather liked what had happened.
+
+Mr. Thrall bustled about for camp-stools, and said, “Do stop and have
+some breakfast with us, it's just coming in. May I introduce my daughter,
+Lady Moors and--and Lord Moors?” The girl took my hand, and the young man
+bowed from his place; but if that poor old man had known, peace was not
+to be made so easily between two such bad-tempered women as Mrs. Thrall
+and myself. We expressed some very stiff sentiments in regard to the
+weather, and the prospect of the yacht getting off with the next tide,
+and my husband joined in with that manly gentleness of his, but we did
+not sit down, much less offer to stay to breakfast. We had got to the
+door of the tent, the family following us, even to the noble son-in-law,
+and as she now realized that we are actually going, Mrs. Thrall gasped
+out, “But you are not _leaving_ us? What shall we _do_ with all these
+natives?”
+
+This was again too much, and I flamed out at her. “_Natives_! They are
+cultivated and refined people, for they are Altrurians, and I assure you
+you will be in much better hands than mine with them, for I am only
+Altrurian by marriage!”
+
+She was one of those leathery egotists that nothing will make a dint in,
+and she came back with, “But we don't speak the language, and they don't
+speak English, and how are we to manage if the yacht doesn't get afloat?”
+
+“Oh, no doubt you will be looked after from the capital we have just
+left. But I will venture to make a little suggestion with regard to the
+natives in the mean time. They are not proud, but they are very
+sensitive, and if you fail in any point of consideration, they will
+understand that you do not want their hospitality.”
+
+“I imagine our own people will be able to look after us,” she answered
+quite as nastily. “We do not propose to be dependent on them. We can pay
+our way here as we do elsewhere.”
+
+“The experiment will be worth trying,” I said. “Come, Aristides!” and I
+took the poor fellow away with me to our van. Mr. Thrall made some
+hopeless little movements towards us, but I would not stop or even look
+back. When we got into the van, I made Aristides put on the full power,
+and fell back into my seat and cried a while, and then I scolded him
+because he would not scold me, and went on in a really scandalous way. It
+must have been a revelation to him, but he only smoothed me on the
+shoulder and said, “Poor Eveleth, poor Eveleth,” till I thought I should
+scream; but it ended in my falling on his neck, and saying I knew I was
+horrid, and what did he want me to do?
+
+After I calmed down into something like rationality, he said he thought
+we had perhaps done the best thing we could for those people in leaving
+them to themselves, for they could come to no possible harm among the
+neighbors. He did not believe from what he had seen of the yacht from the
+shore, and from what the Altrurians had told him, that there was one
+chance in a thousand of her ever getting afloat. But those people would
+have to convince themselves of the fact, and of several other facts in
+their situation. I asked him what he meant, and he said he could tell me,
+but that as yet it was a public affair, and he would rather not
+anticipate the private interest I would feel in it. I did not insist; in
+fact, I wanted to get that odious woman out of my mind as soon as I
+could, for the thought of her threatened to poison the pleasure of the
+rest of our tour.
+
+I believe my husband hurried it a little, though he did not shorten it,
+and we got back to the Maritime Region almost a week sooner than we had
+first intended. I found my dear mother well, and still serenely happy in
+her Altrurian surroundings. She had begun to learn the language, and she
+had a larger acquaintance in the capital, I believe, than any other one
+person. She said everybody had called on her, and they were the kindest
+people she had ever dreamed of. She had exchanged cooking-lessons with
+one lady who, they told her, was a distinguished scientist, and she had
+taught another, who was a great painter, a peculiar embroidery stitch
+which she had learned from my grandmother, and which everybody admired.
+These two ladies had given her most of her grammatical instruction in
+Altrurian, but there was a bright little girl who had enlarged her
+vocabulary more than either, in helping her about her housework, the
+mother having lent her for the purpose. My mother said she was not
+ashamed to make blunders before a child, and the little witch had taken
+the greatest delight in telling her the names of things in the house and
+the streets and the fields outside the town, where they went long walks
+together.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+Well, my dear Dorothea, I had been hoping to go more into detail about my
+mother and about our life in the Maritime Capital, which is to be our
+home for a year, but I had hardly got down the last words when Aristides
+came in with a despatch from the Seventh Regionic, summoning us there on
+important public business: I haven't got over the feeling yet of being
+especially distinguished and flattered at sharing in public business; but
+the Altrurian women are so used to it that they do not think anything of
+it. The despatch was signed by an old friend of my husband's, Cyril
+Chrysostom, who had once been Emissary in England, and to whom my husband
+wrote his letters when he was in America. I hated to leave my mother so
+soon, but it could not be helped, and we took the first electric express
+for the Seventh Regionic, where we arrived in about an hour and forty
+minutes, making the three hundred miles in that time easily. I couldn't
+help regretting our comfortable van, but there was evidently haste in the
+summons, and I confess that I was curious to know what the matter was,
+though I had made a shrewd guess the first instant, and it turned out
+that I was not mistaken.
+
+The long and the short of it was that there was trouble with the people
+who had come ashore in that yacht, and were destined never to go to sea
+in her. She was hopelessly bedded in the sand, and the waves that were
+breaking over her were burying her deeper and deeper. The owners were
+living in their tent as we had left them, and her crew were camped in
+smaller tents and any shelter they could get, along the beach. They had
+brought her stores away, but many of the provisions had been damaged, and
+it had become a pressing question what should be done about the people.
+We had been asked to consult with Cyril and his wife, and the other
+Regionic chiefs and their wives, and we threshed the question out nearly
+the whole night.
+
+I am afraid it will appear rather comical in some aspects to you and Mr.
+Makely, but I can assure you that it was a very serious matter with the
+Altrurian authorities. If there had been any hope of a vessel from the
+capitalistic world touching at Altruria within a definite time, they
+could have managed, for they would have gladly kept the yacht's people
+and owners till they could embark them for Australia or New Zealand, and
+would have made as little of the trouble they were giving as they could.
+But until the trader that brought us should return with the crew, as the
+captain had promised, there was no ship expected, and any other wreck in
+the mean time would only add to their difficulty. You may be surprised,
+though I was not, that the difficulty was mostly with the yacht-owners,
+and above all with Mrs. Thrall, who had baffled every effort of the
+authorities to reduce what they considered the disorder of their life.
+
+With the crew it was a different matter. As soon as they had got drunk on
+the wines and spirits they had brought from the wreck, and then had got
+sober because they had drunk all the liquors up, they began to be more
+manageable; when their provisions ran short, and they were made to
+understand that they would not be allowed to plunder the fields and
+woods, or loot the villages for something to eat, they became almost
+exemplarily docile. At first they were disposed to show fight, and
+the principles of the Altrurians did not allow them to use violence in
+bringing them to subjection; but the men had counted without their hosts
+in supposing that they could therefore do as they pleased, unless they
+pleased to do right. After they had made their first foray they were
+warned by Cyril, who came from the capital to speak English with them,
+that another raid would not be suffered. They therefore attempted it
+by night, but the Altrurians were prepared for them with the flexible
+steel nets which are their only means of defence, and half a dozen
+sailors were taken in one. When they attempted to break out, and their
+shipmates attempted to break in to free them, a light current of
+electricity was sent through the wires and the thing was done. Those
+who were rescued--the Altrurians will not say captured--had hoes put into
+their hands the next morning, and were led into the fields and set to
+work, after a generous breakfast of coffee, bread, and mushrooms. The
+chickens they had killed in their midnight expedition were buried, and
+those which they had not killed lost no time in beginning to lay eggs for
+the sustenance of the reformed castaways. As an extra precaution with the
+“rescued,” when they were put to work, each of them with a kind of shirt
+of mail, worn over his coat, which could easily be electrized by a
+metallic filament connecting with the communal dynamo, and under these
+conditions they each did a full day's work during the Obligatories.
+
+As the short commons grew shorter and shorter, both meat and drink, at
+Camp Famine, and the campers found it was useless to attempt thieving
+from the Altrurians, they had tried begging from the owners in their
+large tent, but they were told that the provisions were giving out there,
+too, and there was nothing for them. When they insisted the servants of
+the owners had threatened them with revolvers, and the sailors, who had
+nothing but their knives, preferred to attempt living on the country.
+Within a week the whole crew had been put to work in the woods and fields
+and quarries, or wherever they could make themselves useful. They were,
+on the whole, so well fed and sheltered that they were perfectly
+satisfied, and went down with the Altrurians on the beach during the
+Voluntaries and helped secure the yacht's boats and pieces of wreckage
+that came ashore. Until they became accustomed or resigned to the
+Altrurian diet, they were allowed to catch shell-fish and the crabs that
+swarmed along the sand and cook them, but on condition that they built
+their fires on the beach, and cooked only during an offshore wind, so
+that the fumes of the roasting should not offend the villagers.
+
+Cyril acknowledged, therefore, that the question of the crew was for the
+present practically settled, but Mr. and Mrs. Thrall, and their daughter
+and son-in-law, with their servants, still presented a formidable
+problem. As yet, their provisions had not run out, and they were living
+in their marquee as we had seen them three weeks earlier, just after
+their yacht went ashore. It could not be said that they were molestive in
+the same sense as the sailors, but they were even more demoralizing in
+the spectacle they offered the neighborhood of people dependent on hired
+service, and in their endeavors to supply themselves in perishable
+provisions, like milk and eggs, by means of money. Cyril had held several
+interviews with them, in which he had at first delicately intimated, and
+then explicitly declared, that the situation could not be prolonged.
+The two men had been able to get the Altrurian point of view in some
+measure, and so had Lady Moors, but Mrs. Thrall had remained stiffly
+obtuse and obstinate, and it was in despair of bringing her to terms
+without resorting to rescue that he had summoned us to help him.
+
+It was not a pleasant job, but of course we could not refuse, and we
+agreed that as soon as we had caught a nap, and had a bite of breakfast
+we would go over to their camp with Cyril and his wife, and see what we
+could do with the obnoxious woman. I confess that I had some little
+consolation in the hope that I should see her properly humbled.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+Mr. Thrall and Lord Moors must have seen us coming, for they met us at
+the door of the tent without the intervention of the footman, and gave us
+quite as much welcome as we could expect in our mission, so disagreeable
+all round. Mr. Thrall was as fatherly with me as before, and Lord Moors
+was as polite to Cyril and Mrs. Chrysostom as could have been wished. In
+fact he and Cyril were a sort of acquaintances from the time of Cyril's
+visit to England where he met the late Earl Moors, the father of the
+present peer, in some of his visits to Toynbee Hall, and the Whitechapel
+Settlements. The earl was very much interested in the slums, perhaps
+because he was rather poor himself, if not quite slummy. The son was then
+at the university, and when he came out and into his title he so far
+shared his father's tastes that he came to America; it was not slumming,
+exactly, but a nobleman no doubt feels it to be something like it. After
+a little while in New York he went out to Colorado, where so many needy
+noblemen bring up, and there he met the Thralls, and fell in love with
+the girl. Cyril had understood--or rather Mrs. Cyril,--that it was a
+love-match on both sides, but on Mrs. Thrall's side it was business. He
+did not even speak of settlements--the English are so romantic when they
+_are_ romantic!--but Mr. Thrall saw to all that, and the young people
+were married after a very short courtship. They spent their honeymoon
+partly in Colorado Springs and partly in San Francisco, where the
+Thralls' yacht was lying, and then they set out on a voyage round the
+world, making stops at the interesting places, and bringing up on the
+beach of the Seventh Region of Altruria, on route for the eastern coast
+of South America. From that time on, Cyril said, we knew their history.
+
+After Mr. Thrall had shaken hands tenderly with me, and cordially with
+Aristides, he said, “Won't you all come inside and have breakfast with
+us? My wife and daughter”--
+
+“Thank you, Mr. Thrall,” Cyril answered for us, “we will sit down here,
+if you please; and as your ladies are not used to business, we will not
+ask you to disturb them.”
+
+“I'm sure Lady Moors,” the young nobleman began, but Cyril waved him
+silent.
+
+“We shall be glad later, but not now! Gentlemen, I have asked my friends
+Aristides Homos and Eveleth Homos to accompany my wife and me this
+morning because Eveleth is an American, and will understand your
+position, and he has lately been in America and will be able to clarify
+the situation from both sides. We wish you to believe that we are
+approaching you in the friendliest spirit, and that nothing could be more
+painful to us than to seem inhospitable.”
+
+“Then why,” the old man asked, with business-like promptness, “do you
+object to our presence here? I don't believe I get your idea.”
+
+“Because the spectacle which your life offers is contrary to good morals,
+and as faithful citizens we cannot countenance it.”
+
+“But in what way is our life immoral? I have always thought that I was a
+good citizen at home; at least I can't remember having been arrested for
+disorderly conduct.”
+
+He smiled at me, as if I should appreciate the joke, and it hurt me to
+keep grave, but suspecting what a bad time he was going to have, I
+thought I had better not join him in any levity.
+
+“I quite conceive you,” Cyril replied. “But you present to our people,
+who are offended by it, the spectacle of dependence upon hireling service
+for your daily comfort and convenience.”
+
+“But, my dear sir,” Mr. Thrall returned, “don't we _pay_ for it? Do our
+servants object to rendering us this service?”
+
+“That has nothing to do with the case; or, rather, it makes it worse. The
+fact that your servants do not object shows how completely they are
+depraved by usage. We should not object if they served you from
+affection, and if you repaid them in kindness; but the fact that you
+think you have made them a due return by giving them money shows how far
+from the right ideal in such a matter the whole capitalistic world is.”
+
+Here, to my great delight, Aristides spoke up:
+
+“If the American practice were half as depraving as it ought logically to
+be in their conditions, their social system would drop to pieces. It was
+always astonishing to me that a people with their facilities for evil,
+their difficulties for good, should remain so kind and just and pure.”
+
+“That is what I understood from your letters to me, my dear Aristides. I
+am willing to leave the general argument for the present. But I should
+like to ask Mr. Thrall a question, and I hope it won't be offensive.”
+
+Mr. Thrall smiled. “At any rate I promise not to be offended.”
+
+“You are a very rich man?”
+
+“Much richer than I would like to be.”
+
+“How rich?”
+
+“Seventy millions; eighty; a hundred; three hundred; I don't just know.”
+
+“I don't suppose you've always felt your great wealth a great blessing?”
+
+“A blessing? There have been times when I felt it a millstone hanged
+about my neck, and could have wished nothing so much as that I were
+thrown into the sea. Man, you don't _know_ what a curse I have felt my
+money to be at such times. When I have given it away, as I have by
+millions at a time, I have never been sure that I was not doing more harm
+than good with it. I have hired men to seek out good objects for me, and
+I have tried my best to find for myself causes and institutions and
+persons who might be helped without hindering others as worthy, but
+sometimes it seems as if every dollar of my money carried a blight with
+it, and infected whoever touched it with a moral pestilence. It has
+reached a sum where the wildest profligate couldn't spend it, and it
+grows and grows. It's as if it were a rising flood that had touched my
+lips, and would go over my head before I could reach the shore. I believe
+I got it honestly, and I have tried to share it with those whose labor
+earned it for me. I have founded schools and hospitals and homes for
+old men and old women, and asylums for children, and the blind, and deaf,
+and dumb, and halt, and mad. Wherever I have found one of my old workmen
+in need, and I have looked personally into the matter, I have provided
+for him fully, short of pauperization. Where I have heard of some gifted
+youth, I have had him educated in the line of his gift. I have collected
+a gallery of works of art, and opened it on Sundays as well as week-days
+to the public free. If there is a story of famine, far or near, I send
+food by the shipload. If there is any great public calamity, my agents
+have instructions to come to the rescue without referring the case to me.
+But it is all useless! The money grows and grows, and I begin to feel
+that my efforts to employ it wisely and wholesomely are making me a
+public laughing-stock as well as an easy mark for every swindler with a
+job or a scheme.” He turned abruptly to me. “But you must often have
+heard the same from my old friend Strange. We used to talk these things
+over together, when our money was not the heap that mine is now; and it
+seems to me I can hear his voice saying the very words I have been
+using.”
+
+I, too, seemed to hear his voice in the words, and it was as if speaking
+from his grave.
+
+I looked at Aristides, and read compassion in his dear face; but the face
+of Cyril remained severe and judicial. He said: “Then, if what you say is
+true, you cannot think it a hardship if we remove your burden for the
+time you remain with us. I have consulted with the National and Regional
+as well as the Communal authorities, and we cannot let you continue to
+live in the manner you are living here. You must pay your way.”
+
+“I shall be only too glad to do that,” Mr. Thrall returned, more
+cheerfully. “We have not a great deal of cash in hand, but I can give you
+my check on London or Paris or New York.”
+
+“In Altruria,” Cyril returned, “we have no use for money. You must _pay_
+your way as soon as your present provision from your yacht is exhausted.”
+
+Mr. Thrall turned a dazed look on the young lord, who suggested: “I don't
+think we follow you. How can Mr. Thrall pay his way except with money?”
+
+“He must pay with _work_. As soon as you come upon the neighbors here for
+the necessities of life you must all work. To-morrow or the next day or
+next week at the furthest you must go to work, or you must starve.”
+
+Then he came out with that text of Scripture which had been so efficient
+with the crew of the _Little Sally_: “For even when we were with you this
+we commanded you, that if any would not work neither should he eat.”
+
+Lord Moors seemed very interested, and not so much surprised as I had
+expected. “Yes, I have often thought of that passage and of its
+susceptibility to a simpler interpretation than we usually give it.
+But--”
+
+“There is but one interpretation of which it is susceptible,” Cyril
+interrupted. “The apostle gives that interpretation when he prefaces the
+text with the words, 'For yourselves know how you ought to follow us; for
+we behaved not ourselves disorderly among you. Neither did we eat any
+man's bread for nought; but _wrought with travail_ night and day, that we
+might not be chargeable to any of you: not because we have not power, but
+to make ourselves an ensample unto you to follow us.' The whole economy
+of Altruria is founded on these passages.”
+
+“Literally?”
+
+“Literally.”
+
+“But, my dear sir,” the young lord reasoned, “you surely do not wrench
+the text from some such meaning as that if a man has money, he may pay
+his way without working?”
+
+“No, certainly not. But here you have no money, and as we cannot suffer
+any to 'walk among us disorderly, working not at all,' we must not exempt
+you from our rule.”
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+At this point there came a sound from within the marquee as of skirts
+sweeping forward sharply, imperiously, followed by a softer _frou-frou_,
+and Mrs. Thrall put aside the curtain of the tent with one hand, and
+stood challenging our little Altrurian group, while Lady Moors peered
+timidly at us from over her mother's shoulder. I felt a lust of battle
+rising in me at sight of that woman, and it was as much as I could do to
+control myself; but in view of the bad time I knew she was going to have,
+I managed to hold in, though I joined very scantly in the polite
+greetings of the Chrysostoms and Aristides, which she ignored as if they
+had been the salutations of savages. She glared at her husband for
+explanation, and he said, gently, “This is a delegation from the
+Altrurian capital, my dear, and we have been talking over the situation
+together.”
+
+“But what is this,” she demanded, “that I have heard about our not
+paying? Do they accuse us of not paying? You could buy and sell the whole
+country.”
+
+I never imagined so much mildness could be put into such offensive words
+as Cyril managed to get into his answer. “We accuse you of not paying,
+and we do not mean that you shall become chargeable to us. The men and
+women who served you on shipboard have been put to work, and you must go
+to work, too.”
+
+“Mr. Thrall--Lord Moors--have you allowed these people to treat you as if
+you were part of the ship's crew? Why don't you give them what they want
+and let them go? Of course it's some sort of blackmailing scheme. But you
+ought to get rid of them at any cost. Then you can appeal to the
+authorities, and tell them that you will bring the matter to the notice
+of the government at Washington. They must be taught that they cannot
+insult American citizens with impunity.” No one spoke, and she added,
+“What do they really want?”
+
+“Well, my dear,” her husband hesitated, “I hardly know how to explain.
+But it seems that they think our living here in the way we do is
+orderly, and--and they want us to go to work, in short.”
+
+“To _work!_” she shouted.
+
+“Yes, all of us. That is, so I understand.”
+
+“What nonsense!”
+
+She looked at us one after another, and when her eye rested on me, I
+began to suspect that insolent as she was she was even duller; in fact,
+that she was so sodden in her conceit of wealth that she was plain
+stupid. So when she said to me, “You are an American by birth, I believe.
+Can you tell me the meaning of this?” I answered:
+
+“Cyril Chrysostom represents the authorities. If _he_ asks me to speak, I
+will speak.” Cyril nodded at me with a smile, and I went on. “It is a
+very simple matter. In Altruria everybody works with his hands three
+hours a day. After that he works or not, as he likes.”
+
+“What have we to do with that?” she asked.
+
+“The rule has no exceptions.”
+
+“But we are not Altrurians; we are Americans.”
+
+“I am an American, too, and I work three hours every day, unless I am
+passing from one point to another on public business with my husband.
+Even then we prefer to stop during the work-hours, and help in the
+fields, or in the shops, or wherever we are needed. I left my own mother
+at home doing her kitchen work yesterday afternoon, though it was out of
+hours, and she need not have worked.”
+
+“Very well, then, we will do nothing of the kind, neither I, nor my
+daughter, nor my husband. He has worked hard all his life, and he has
+come away for a much-needed rest. I am not going to have him breaking
+himself down.”
+
+I could not help suggesting, “I suppose the men at work in his mines, and
+mills, and on his railroads and steamship lines are taking a much-needed
+rest, too. I hope you are not going to let them break themselves down,
+either.”
+
+Aristides gave me a pained glance, and Cyril and his wife looked grave,
+but she not quite so grave as he. Lord Moors said, “We don't seem to be
+getting on. What Mrs. Thrall fails to see, and I confess I don't quite
+see it myself, is that if we are not here _in forma pauperis_--”
+
+“But you _are_ here _in forma pauperis_,” Cyril interposed, smilingly.
+
+“How is that? If we are willing to pay--if Mr. Thrall's credit is
+undeniably good--”
+
+“Mr. Thrall's credit is not good in Altruria; you can pay here only in
+one currency, in the sweat of your faces.”
+
+“You want us to be Tolstoys, I suppose,” Mrs. Thrall said,
+contemptuously.
+
+Cyril replied, gently, “The endeavor of Tolstoy, in capitalistic
+conditions, is necessarily dramatic. Your labor here will be for your
+daily bread, and it will be real.” The inner dullness of the woman came
+into her eyes again, and he addressed himself to Lord Moors in
+continuing: “If a company of indigent people were cast away on an English
+coast, after you had rendered them the first aid, what should you do?”
+
+The young man reflected. “I suppose we should put them in the way of
+earning a living until some ship arrived to take them home.”
+
+“That is merely what we propose to do in your case here,” Cyril said.
+
+“But we are not indigent--”
+
+“Yes, you are absolutely destitute. You have money and credit, but
+neither has any value in Altruria. Nothing but work or love has any value
+in Altruria. You cannot realize too clearly that you stand before us _in
+forma pauperis_. But we require of you nothing that we do not require of
+ourselves. In Altruria every one is poor till he pays with work; then,
+for that time, he is rich; and he cannot otherwise lift himself above
+charity, which, except in the case of the helpless, we consider immoral.
+Your life here offers a very corrupting spectacle. You are manifestly
+living without work, and you are served by people whose hire you are not
+able to pay.”
+
+“My dear sir,” Mr. Thrall said at this point, with a gentle smile, “I
+think they are willing to take the chances of being paid.”
+
+“We cannot suffer them to do so. At present we know of no means of your
+getting away from Altruria. We have disused our custom of annually
+connecting with the Australasian steamers, and it may be years before a
+vessel touches on our coast. A ship sailed for Boston some months ago,
+with the promise of returning in order that the crew may cast in their
+lot with us permanently. We do not confide in that promise, and you must
+therefore conform to our rule of life. Understand clearly that the
+willingness of your servants to serve you has nothing to do with the
+matter. That is part of the falsity in which the whole capitalistic world
+lives. As the matter stands with you, here, there is as much reason why
+you should serve them as they should serve you. If on their side they
+should elect to serve you from love, they will be allowed to do so.
+Otherwise, you and they must go to work with the neighbors at the tasks
+they will assign you.”
+
+“Do you mean at once?” Lord Moors asked.
+
+“The hours of the obligatory labors are nearly past for the day. But if
+you are interested in learning what you will be set to doing to-morrow,
+the Communal authorities will be pleased to instruct you during the
+Voluntaries this afternoon. You may be sure that in no case will your
+weakness or inexperience be overtasked. Your histories will be studied,
+and appropriate work will be assigned to each of you.”
+
+Mrs. Thrall burst out, “If you think I am going into my kitchen--”
+
+Then I burst in, “I left my mother in _her_ kitchen!”
+
+“And a very fit place for her, I dare say,” she retorted, but Lady Moors
+caught her mother's arm and murmured, in much the same distress as showed
+in my husband's mild eyes, “Mother! Mother!” and drew her within.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+Well, Dolly, I suppose you will think it was pretty hard for those
+people, and when I got over my temper I confess that I felt sorry for the
+two men, and for the young girl whom the Altrurians would not call Lady
+Moors, but addressed by her Christian name, as they did each of the
+American party in his or her turn; even Mrs. Thrall had to answer to
+Rebecca. They were all rather bewildered, and so were the butler and
+the footmen, and the _chef_ and his helpers, and the ladies' maids.
+These were even more shocked than those they considered their betters,
+and I quite took to my affections Lord Moors' man Robert, who was in an
+awe-stricken way trying to get some light from me on the situation. He
+contributed as much as any one to bring about a peaceful submission to
+the inevitable, for he had been a near witness of what had happened to
+the crew when they attempted their rebellion to the authorities; but he
+did not profess to understand the matter, and from time to time he seemed
+to question the reality of it.
+
+The two masters, as you would call Mr. Thrall and Lord Moors, both took
+an attitude of amiable curiosity towards their fate, and accepted it with
+interest when they had partly chosen and partly been chosen by it. Mr.
+Thrall had been brought up on a farm till his ambition carried him into
+the world; and he found the light gardening assigned him for his first
+task by no means a hardship. He was rather critical of the Altrurian
+style of hoe at first, but after he got the hang of it, as he said, he
+liked it better, and during the three hours of the first morning's
+Obligatoires, his ardor to cut all the weeds out at once had to be
+restrained rather than prompted. He could not be persuaded to take five
+minutes for rest out of every twenty, and he could not get over his
+life-long habit of working against time. The Altrurians tried to make
+him understand that here people must not work _against_ time, but must
+always work _with_ it, so as to have enough work to do each day;
+otherwise they must remain idle during the Obligatoires and tend to
+demoralize the workers. It seemed that Lady Moors had a passion for
+gardening, and she was set to work with her father on the border of
+flowers surrounding the vegetable patch he was hoeing. She knew about
+flowers, and from her childhood had amused herself by growing them, and
+so far from thinking it a hardship or disgrace to dig, she was delighted
+to get at them. It was easy to see that she and her father were cronies,
+and when I went round in the morning with Aristides to ask if we could do
+anything for them, we heard them laughing and talking gayly together
+before we reached them. They said they had looked their job (as Mr.
+Thrall called it) over the afternoon before during the Voluntaries, and
+had decided how they would manage, and they had set to work that morning
+as soon as they had breakfast. Lady Moors had helped her mother get the
+breakfast, and she seemed to regard the whole affair as a picnic, though
+from the look of Mrs. Thrall's back, as she turned it on me, when I saw
+her coming to the door of the marquee with a coffee-pot in her hand, I
+decided that she was not yet resigned to her new lot in life.
+
+Lord Moors was nowhere to be seen, and I felt some little curiosity about
+him which was not quite anxiety. Later, as we were going back to our
+quarters in the village, we saw him working on the road with a party
+of Altrurians who were repairing a washout from an overnight rain. They
+were having all kinds of a time, except a bad time, trying to understand
+each other in their want of a common language. It appeared that the
+Altrurians were impressed with his knowledge of road-making, and were
+doing something which he had indicated to them by signs. We offered
+our services as interpreters, and then he modestly owned in defence of
+his suggestions that when he was at Oxford he had been one of the band of
+enthusiastic undergraduates who had built a piece of highway under Mr.
+Ruskin's direction. The Altrurians regarded his suggestions as rather
+amateurish, but they were glad to act upon them, when they could, out of
+pure good feeling and liking for him; and from time to time they rushed
+upon him and shook hands with him; their affection did not go further,
+and he was able to stand the handshaking, though he told us he hoped they
+would not feel it necessary to keep it up, for it was really only a very
+simple matter like putting a culvert in place of a sluice which they had
+been using to carry the water off. They understood what he was saying,
+from his gestures, and they crowded round us to ask whether he would like
+to join them during the Voluntaries that afternoon, in getting the stone
+out of a neighboring quarry, and putting in the culvert at once. We
+explained to him, and he said he should be very happy. All the time he
+was looking at them admirably, and he said, “It's really very good,” and
+we understood that he meant their classic working-dress, and when he
+added, “I should really fancy trying it myself one day,” and we told them
+they wanted to go and bring him an Altrurian costume at once. But we
+persuaded them not to urge him, and in fact he looked very fit for his
+work in his yachting flannels.
+
+I talked him over a long time with Aristides, and tried to get his point
+of view. I decided finally that an Englishman of his ancient lineage and
+high breeding, having voluntarily come down to the level of an American
+millionaire by marriage, could not feel that he was lowering himself any
+further by working with his hands. In fact, he probably felt that his
+merely undertaking a thing dignified the thing; but of course this was
+only speculation on my part, and he may have been resigned to working for
+a living because like poor people elsewhere he was obliged to do it.
+Aristides thought there was a good deal in that idea, but it is hard for
+an Altrurian to conceive of being ashamed of work, for they regard
+idleness as pauperism, and they would look upon our leisure classes, so
+far as we have them, very much as we look upon tramps, only they would
+make the excuse for our tramps that they often cannot get work.
+
+We had far more trouble with the servants than we had with the masters in
+making them understand that they were to go to work in the fields and
+shops, quite as the crew of the yacht had done. Some of them refused
+outright, and stuck to their refusal until the village electrician
+rescued them with the sort of net and electric filament which had been
+employed with the recalcitrant sailors; others were brought to a better
+mind by withholding food from them till they were willing to pay for it
+by working. You will be sorry to learn, Dolly, that the worst of the
+rebels were the ladies' maids, who, for the honor of our sex, ought not
+to have required the application of the net and filament; but they had
+not such appetites as the men-servants, and did not mind starving so
+much. However, in a very short time they were at work, too, and more or
+less resigned, though they did not profess to understand it.
+
+You will think me rather fickle, I am afraid, but after I made the
+personal acquaintance of Mr. Thrall's _chef,_ Anatole, I found my
+affections dividing themselves between him and his lordship's man Robert,
+my first love. But Anatole was magnificent, a gaunt, little, aquiline
+man, with a branching mustache and gallant goatee, and having held an
+exalted position at a salary of ten thousand a year from Mr. Thrall, he
+could easily stoop from it, while poor Robert was tormented with
+misgivings, not for himself, but for Lord and Lady Moors and Mr. Thrall.
+It became my pleasing office to explain the situation to Monsieur
+Anatole, who, when he imagined it, gave a cry of joy, and confessed, what
+he had never liked to tell Mr. Thrall, knowing the misconceptions of
+Americans on the subject, that he had belonged in France to a party of
+which the political and social ideal was almost identical with that
+of the Altrurians. He asked for an early opportunity of addressing the
+village Assembly and explaining this delightful circumstance in public,
+and he profited by the occasion to embrace the first Altrurian we met and
+kiss him on both cheeks.
+
+His victim was a messenger from the Commune, who had been sent to inquire
+whether Anatole had a preference as to the employment which should be
+assigned to him, and I had to reply for him that he was a man of science;
+that he would be happy to serve the republic in whatever capacity his
+concitizens chose, but that he thought he could be most useful in
+studying the comestible vegetation of the neighborhood, and the
+substitution of the more succulent herbs for the flesh-meats to the use
+of which, he understood from me, the Altrurians were opposed. In the
+course of his preparation for the rôle of _chef_, which he had played
+both in France and America, he had made a specialty of edible fungi;
+and the result was that Anatole was set to mushrooming, and up to this
+moment he has discovered no less than six species hitherto unknown to the
+Altrurian table. This has added to their dietary in several important
+particulars, the fungi he has discovered being among those highly
+decorative and extremely poisonous-looking sorts which flourish in the
+deep woods and offer themselves almost inexhaustibly in places near the
+ruins of the old capitalistic cities, where hardly any other foods will
+grow. Anatole is very proud of his success, and at more than one Communal
+Assembly has lectured upon his discoveries and treated of their
+preparation for the table, with sketches of them as he found them
+growing, colored after nature by his own hand. He has himself become a
+fanatical vegetarian, having, he confesses, always had a secret loathing
+for the meats he stooped to direct the cooking of among the French and
+American bourgeoisie in the days which he already looks back upon as
+among the most benighted of his history.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+The scene has changed again, Dolly, and six months have elapsed without
+your knowing it. Aristides and I long ago completed the tour of the
+capitals which the Thrall incident interrupted, and we have been settled
+for many months in the Maritime Capital, where it has been decided we had
+better fill out the first two years of my husband's repatriation. I have
+become more and more thoroughly naturalized, and if I am not yet a
+perfect Altrurian, it is not for not loving better and better the best
+Altrurian of them all, and not for not admiring and revering this
+wonderful civilization.
+
+During the Obligatories of the forenoons I do my housework with my own
+hands, and as my mother lives with us we have long talks together, and
+try to make each other believe that the American conditions were a sort
+of nightmare from which we have happily awakened. You see how terribly
+frank I am, my dear, but if I were not, I could not make you understand
+how I feel. My heart aches for you, there, and the more because I know
+that you do not want to live differently, that you are proud of your
+economic and social illogicality, and that you think America is the best
+country under the sun! I can never persuade you, but if you could only
+come here, once, and see for yourselves! Seeing would be believing, and
+believing would be the wish never to go away, but to be at home here
+always.
+
+I can imagine your laughing at me and asking Mr. Makely whether the
+_Little Sally_ has ever returned to Altruria, and how I can account for
+the captain's failure to keep his word. I confess that is a sore point
+with me. It is now more than a year since she sailed, and, of course, we
+have not had a sign or whisper from her. I could almost wish that the
+crew were willing to stay away, but I am afraid it is the captain who is
+keeping them. It has become almost a mania with me, and every morning,
+the first thing when I wake, I go for my before-breakfast walk along the
+marble terrace that overlooks the sea, and scan the empty rounding for
+the recreant ship. I do not want to think so badly of human nature, as I
+must if the _Little Sally_ never comes back, and I am sure you will not
+blame me if I should like her to bring me some word from you. I know that
+if she ever reached Boston you got my letters and presents, and that you
+have been writing me as faithfully as I have been writing you, and what a
+sheaf of letters from you there will be if her masts ever pierce
+the horizon! To tell the truth, I do long for a little American news! Do
+you still keep on murdering and divorcing, and drowning, and burning, and
+mommicking, and maiming people by sea and land? Has there been any war
+since I left? Is the financial panic as great as ever, and is there as
+much hunger and cold? I know that whatever your crimes and calamities
+are, your heroism and martyrdom, your wild generosity and self-devotion,
+are equal to them.
+
+It is no use to pretend that in little over a year I can have become
+accustomed to the eventlessness of life in Altruria. I go on for a good
+many days together and do not miss the exciting incidents you have in
+America, and then suddenly I am wolfishly hungry for the old sensations,
+just as now and then I _want meat_, though I know I should loathe the
+sight and smell of it if I came within reach of it. You would laugh, I
+dare say, at the Altrurian papers, and what they print for news. Most of
+the space is taken up with poetry, and character study in the form of
+fiction, and scientific inquiry of every kind. But now and then there is
+a report of the production of a new play in one of the capitals; or an
+account of an open-air pastoral in one of the communes; or the progress
+of some public work, like the extension of the National Colonnade; or the
+wonderful liberation of some section from malaria; or the story of some
+good man or woman's life, ended at the patriarchal age they reach here.
+They also print selected passages of capitalistic history, from the
+earliest to the latest times, showing how in war and pestilence and
+needless disaster the world outside Altruria remains essentially the same
+that it was at the beginning of civilization, with some slight changes
+through the changes of human nature for the better in its slow approaches
+to the Altrurian ideal. In noting these changes the writers get some sad
+amusement out of the fact that the capitalistic world believes human
+nature cannot be changed, though cannibalism and slavery and polygamy
+have all been extirpated in the so-called Christian countries, and these
+things were once human nature, which is always changing, while brute
+nature remains the same. Now and then they touch very guardedly on that
+slavery, worse than war, worse than any sin or shame conceivable to the
+Altrurians, in which uncounted myriads of women are held and bought and
+sold, and they have to note that in this the capitalistic world is
+without the hope of better things. You know what I mean, Dolly; every
+good woman knows the little she cannot help knowing; but if you had ever
+inquired into that horror, as I once felt obliged to do, you would think
+it the blackest horror of the state of things where it must always exist
+as long as there are riches and poverty. Now, when so many things in
+America seem bad dreams, I cannot take refuge in thinking that a bad
+dream; the reality was so deeply burnt into my brain by the words of
+some of the slaves; and when I think of it I want to grovel on the ground
+with my mouth in the dust. But I know this can only distress you, for you
+cannot get away from the fact as I have got away from it; that there it
+is in the next street, perhaps in the next house, and that any night when
+you leave your home with your husband, you may meet it at the first step
+from your door.
+
+You can very well imagine what a godsend the reports of Aristides and the
+discussions of them have been to our papers. They were always taken down
+stenographically, and they were printed like dialogue, so that at a
+little distance you would take them at first for murder trials or divorce
+cases, but when you look closer, you find them questions and answers
+about the state of things in America. There are often humorous passages,
+for the Altrurians are inextinguishably amused by our illogicality, and
+what they call the perpetual _non sequiturs_ of our lives and laws. In
+the discussions they frequently burlesque these, but as they present them
+they seem really beyond the wildest burlesque. Perhaps you will be
+surprised to know that a nation of working-people like these feel more
+compassion than admiration for our working-people. They pity them, but
+they blame them more than they blame the idle rich for the existing
+condition of things in America. They ask why, if the American workmen
+are in the immense majority, they do not vote a true and just state, and
+why they go on striking and starving their families instead; they cannot
+distinguish in principle between the confederations of labor and the
+combinations of capital, between the trusts and the trades-unions, and
+they condemn even more severely the oppressions and abuses of the unions.
+My husband tries to explain that the unions are merely provisional, and
+are a temporary means of enabling the employees to stand up against the
+tyranny of the employers, but they always come back and ask him if the
+workmen have not most of the votes, and if they have, why they do not
+protect themselves peacefully instead of organizing themselves in
+fighting shape, and making a warfare of industry.
+
+There is not often anything so much like news in the Altrurian papers as
+the grounding of the Thrall yacht on the coast of the Seventh Region, and
+the incident has been treated and discussed in every possible phase by
+the editors and their correspondents. They have been very frank about it,
+as they are about everything in Altruria, and they have not concealed
+their anxieties about their unwelcome guests. They got on without much
+trouble in the case of the few sailors of the _Little Sally_, but the
+crew of the _Saraband_ is so large that it is a different matter. In the
+first place, they do not like the application of force, even in the mild
+electrical form in which they employ it, and they fear that the effect
+with themselves will be bad, however good it is for their guests.
+Besides, they dread the influence which a number of people, invested with
+the charm of strangeness, may have with the young men and especially the
+young girls of the neighborhood. The hardest thing the Altrurians have to
+grapple with is feminine curiosity, and the play of this about the
+strangers is what they seek the most anxiously to control. Of course, you
+will think it funny, and I must say that it seemed so to me at first, but
+I have come to think it is serious. The Altrurian girls are cultivated
+and refined, but as they have worked all their lives with their hands
+they cannot imagine the difference that work makes in Americans; that it
+coarsens and classes them, especially if they have been in immediate
+contact with rich people, and been degraded or brutalized by the
+knowledge of the contempt in which labor is held among us by those who
+are not compelled to it. Some of my Altrurian friends have talked it over
+with me, and I could take their point of view, though secretly I could
+not keep my poor American feelings from being hurt when they said that to
+have a large number of people from the capitalistic world thrown upon
+their hands was very much as it would be with us if we had the same
+number of Indians, with all their tribal customs and ideals, thrown upon
+our hands. They say they will not shirk their duty in the matter, and
+will study it carefully; but all the same, they wish the incident had not
+happened.
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+I am glad that I was called away from the disagreeable point I left in my
+last, and that I have got back temporarily to the scene of the
+Altrurianization of Mr. Thrall and his family. So far as it has gone it
+is perfect, if I may speak from the witness of happiness in those
+concerned, except perhaps Mrs. Thrall; she is as yet only partially
+reconstructed, but even she has moments of forgetting her lost grandeur
+and of really enjoying herself in her work. She is an excellent
+housekeeper, and she has become so much interested in making the marquee
+a simple home for her family that she is rather proud of showing it off
+as the effect of her unaided efforts. She was allowed to cater to them
+from the canned meats brought ashore from the yacht as long as they would
+stand it, but the wholesome open-air conditions have worked a wonderful
+change in them, and neither Mr. Thrall nor Lord and Lady Moors now have
+any taste for such dishes. Here Mrs. Thrall's old-time skill as an
+excellent vegetable cook, when she was the wife of a young mechanic, has
+come into play, and she believes that she sets the best table in the
+whole neighborhood, with fruits and many sorts of succulents and the
+everlasting and ever-pervading mushrooms.
+
+As the Altrurians do not wish to annoy their involuntary guests, or to
+interfere with their way of life where they do not consider it immoral,
+their control has ended with setting them to work for a living. They
+have not asked them to the communal refectory, but, as long as they have
+been content to serve each other, have allowed them their private table.
+Of course, their adaptation to their new way of life has proceeded more
+slowly than it otherwise would, but with the exception of Mrs. Thrall
+they are very intelligent people, and I have been charmed in talking the
+situation over with them. The trouble has not been so great with the
+ship's people, as was feared. Such of these as have imagined their stay
+here permanent, or wished it to be so, have been received into the
+neighboring communes, and have taken the first steps towards
+naturalization; those who look forward to getting away some time, or
+express the wish for it, are allowed to live in a community of their own,
+where they are not molested as long as they work in the three hours of
+the Obligatoires. Naturally, they are kept out of mischief, but after
+their first instruction in the ideas of public property and the
+impossibility of enriching themselves at the expense of any one else,
+they have behaved very well. The greatest trouble they ever gave was in
+trapping and killing the wild things for food; but when they were told
+that this must not be done, and taught to recognize the vast range of
+edible fungi, they took not unwillingly to mushrooms and the ranker
+tubers and roots, from which, with unlimited eggs, cheese, milk, and
+shell-fish, they have constructed a diet of which they do not complain.
+
+This brings me rather tangentially to Monsieur Anatole, who has become a
+fanatical Altrurian, and has even had to be restrained in some of his
+enthusiastic plans for the compulsory naturalization of his fellow
+castaways. His value as a scientist has been cordially recognized, and
+his gifts as an artist in the exquisite water-color studies of edible
+fungi has won his notice in the capital of the Seventh Regional where
+they have been shown at the spring water-color exhibition. He has printed
+several poems in the _Regional Gazette_, villanelles, rondeaux, and
+triolets, with accompanying versions of the French, into Altrurian by one
+of the first Altrurian poets. This is a widow of about Monsieur Anatole's
+own age; and the literary friendship between them has ripened into
+something much more serious. In fact they are engaged to be married. I
+suppose you will laugh at this, Dolly, and at first I confess that there
+was enough of the old American in me to be shocked at the idea of a
+French _chef_ marrying an Altrurian lady who could trace her descent to
+the first Altrurian president of the Commonwealth, and who is universally
+loved and honored. I could not help letting something of the kind escape
+me by accident, to a friend, and presently Mrs. Chrysostom was sent to
+interview me on the subject, and to learn just how the case appeared to
+me. This put me on my honor, and I was obliged to say how it would appear
+in America, though every moment I grew more and more ashamed of myself
+and my native country, where we pretend that labor is honorable, and are
+always heaping dishonor on it. I told how certain of our girls and
+matrons had married their coachmen and riding-masters and put themselves
+at odds with society, and I confessed that marrying a cook would be
+regarded as worse, if possible.
+
+Mrs. Chrysostom was accompanied by a lady in her second youth, very
+graceful, very charmingly dressed, and with an expression of winning
+intelligence, whom she named to me simply as Cecilia, in the Altrurian
+fashion. She apparently knew no English, and at first Mrs. Chrysostom
+translated each of her questions and my answers. When I had got through,
+this lady began to question me herself in Altrurian, which I owned to
+understanding a little. She said:
+
+“You know Anatole?”
+
+“Yes, certainly, and I like him, as I think every one must who knows
+him.”
+
+“He is a skillful _chef_?”
+
+“Mr. Thrall would not have paid him ten thousand dollars a year if he had
+not been.”
+
+“You have seen some of his water-colors?”
+
+“Yes. They are exquisite. He is unquestionably an artist of rare talent.”
+
+“And it is known to you that he is a man of scientific attainments?”
+
+“That is something I cannot judge of so well as Aristides; but _he_ says
+M. Anatole is learned beyond any man he knows in edible fungi.”
+
+“As an adoptive Altrurian, and knowing the American ideas from our point
+of view, should you respect their ideas of social inequality?”
+
+“Not the least in the world. I understand as well as you do that their
+ideas must prevail wherever one works for a living and another does not.
+hose ideas are practically as much accepted in America as they are in
+Europe, but I have fully renounced them.”
+
+You see, Dolly, how far I have gone!
+
+The unknown, who could be pretty easily imagined, rose up and gave me her
+hand. “If you are in the Region on the third of May you must come to our
+wedding.”
+
+The same afternoon I had a long talk with Mr. Thrall, whom I found at
+work replanting a strawberry-patch during the Voluntaries. He rose up at
+the sound of my voice, and after an old man's dim moment for getting me
+mentally in focus, he brightened into a genial smile, and said, “Oh, Mrs.
+Homos! I am glad to see you.”
+
+I told him to go on with his planting, and I offered to get down on my
+knees beside him and help, but he gallantly handed me to a seat in the
+shade beside his daughter's flower-bed, and it was there that we had a
+long talk about conditions in America and Altruria, and how he felt about
+the great change in his life.
+
+“Well, I can truly say,” he answered much more at length than I shall
+report, “that I have never been so happy since the first days of my
+boyhood. All care has dropped from me; I don't feel myself rich, and I
+don't feel myself poor in this perfect safety from want. The only thing
+that gives me any regret is that my present state has not been the effect
+of my own will and deed. If I am now following the greatest and truest of
+all counsels it has not been because I have sold all and given to the
+poor, but because my money has been mercifully taken from me, and I have
+been released from its responsibilities in a state of things where there
+is no money.”
+
+“But, Mr. Thrall,” I said, “don't you ever feel that you have a duty to
+the immense fortune which you have left in America, and which must be
+disposed of somehow when people are satisfied that you are not going to
+return and dispose of it yourself?”
+
+“No, none. I was long ago satisfied that I could really do no good with
+it. Perhaps if I had had more faith in it I might have done some good
+with it, but I believe that I never did anything but harm, even when I
+seemed to be helping the most, for I was aiding in the perpetuation of a
+state of things essentially wrong. Now, if I never go back--and I never
+wish to go back--let the law dispose of it as seems best to the
+authorities. I have no kith or kin, and my wife has none, so there is no
+one to feel aggrieved by its application to public objects.”
+
+“And how do you imagine it will be disposed of?”
+
+“Oh, I suppose for charitable and educational purposes. Of course a good
+deal of it will go in graft; but that cannot be helped.”
+
+“But if you could now dispose of it according to your clearest ideas of
+justice, and if you were forced to make the disposition yourself, what
+would you do with it?”
+
+“Well, that is something I have been thinking of, and as nearly as I can
+make out, I ought to go into the records of my prosperity and ascertain
+just how and when I made my money. Then I ought to seek out as fully as
+possible the workmen who helped me make it by their labor. Their wages,
+which, were always the highest, were never a fair share, though I forced
+myself to think differently, and it should be my duty to inquire for them
+and pay them each a fair share, or, if they are dead, then their children
+or their next of kin. But even when I had done this I should not be sure
+that I had not done them more harm than good.”
+
+How often I had heard poor Mr. Strange say things like this, and heard
+of other rich men saying them, after lives of what is called beneficence!
+Mr. Thrall drew a deep sigh, and cast a longing look at his
+strawberry-bed. I laughed, and said, “You are anxious to get back to your
+plants, and I won't keep you. I wonder if Mrs. Thrall could see me if I
+called; or Lady Moors?”
+
+He said he was sure they would, and I took my way over to the marquee. I
+was a little surprised to be met at the door by Lord Moors' man Robert.
+He told me he was very sorry, but her ladyship was helping his lordship
+at a little job on the roads, which they were doing quite in the
+Voluntaries, with the hope of having the National Colonnade extended to a
+given point; the ladies were helping the gentlemen get the place in
+shape. He was still sorrier, but I not so much, that Mrs. Thrall was
+lying down and would like to be excused; she was rather tired from
+putting away the luncheon things.
+
+He asked me if I would not sit down, and he offered me one of the
+camp-stools at the door of the marquee, and I did sit down for a moment,
+while he flitted about the interior doing various little things. At last
+I said, “How is this, Robert? I thought you had been assigned to a place
+in the communal refectory. You're not here on the old terms?”
+
+He came out and stood respectfully holding a dusting-cloth in his hand.
+“Thank you, not exactly, ma'am. But the fact is, ma'am, that the communal
+monitors have allowed me to come back here a few hours in the afternoon,
+on what I may call terms of my own.”
+
+“I don't understand. But won't you sit down, Robert?”
+
+“Thank you, if it is the same to you, ma'am, I would rather stand while
+I'm here. In the refectory, of course, it's different.”
+
+“But about your own terms?”
+
+“Thanks. You see, ma'am, I've thought all along it was a bit awkward for
+them here, they not being so much used to looking after things, and I
+asked leave to come and help now and then. Of course, they said that
+I could not be allowed to serve for hire in Altruria; and one thing led
+to another, and I said it would really be a favor to me, and I didn't
+expect money for my work, for I did not suppose I should ever be where I
+could use it again, but if they would let me come here and do it for--”
+
+Robert stopped and blushed and looked down, and I took the word, “For
+love?”
+
+“Well, ma'am, that's what they called it.”
+
+Dolly, it made the tears come into my eyes, and I said very solemnly,
+“Robert, do you know, I believe you are the sweetest soul even in this
+and flowing with milk and honey?”
+
+“Oh, you mustn't say that, ma'am. There's Mr. Thrall and his lordship and
+her ladyship. I'm sure they would do the like for me if I needed their
+help. And there are the Altrurians, you know.”
+
+“But they are used to it, Robert, and--Robert! Be frank with me! What do
+you think of Altruria?”
+
+“Quite frank, ma'am, as if you were not connected with it, as you are?”
+
+“Quite frank.”
+
+“Well, ma'am, if you are sure you wouldn't mind it, or consider it out of
+the way for me, I should say it was--rum.”
+
+“_Rum_? Don't you think it is beautiful here, to see people living for
+each other instead of living _on_ each other, and the whole nation like
+one family, and the country a paradise?”
+
+“Well, that's just it, ma'am, if you won't mind my saying so. That's what
+I mean by rum.”
+
+“Won't you explain?”
+
+“It doesn't seem _real_. Every night when I go to sleep, and think that
+there isn't a thief or a policeman on the whole continent, and only a few
+harmless homicides, as you call them, that wouldn't hurt a fly, and not a
+person hungry or cold, and no poor and no rich, and no servants and no
+masters, and no soldiers, and no--disreputable characters, it seems as if
+I was going to wake up in the morning and find myself on the _Saraband_
+and it all a dream here.”
+
+“Yes, Robert,” I had to own, “that was the way with me, too, for a long
+while. And even now I have dreams about America and the way matters are
+there, and I wake myself weeping for fear Altruria _isn't_ true. Robert!
+You must be honest with me! When you are awake, and it's broad day, and
+you see how happy every one is here, either working or playing, and the
+whole land without an ugly place in it, and the lovely villages and the
+magnificent towns, and everything, does it still seem--rum?”
+
+“It's like that, ma'am, at times. I don't say at all times.”
+
+“And you don't believe that the rest of the world--England and
+America--will ever be rum, too?”
+
+“I don't see how they can. You see the poor are against it as well as the
+rich. Everybody wants to have something of his own, and the trouble seems
+to come from that. I don't suppose it was brought about in a day,
+Altruria wasn't, ma'am?”
+
+“No, it was whole centuries coming.”
+
+“That was what I understood from that Mr. Chrysostom--Cyril, he wants me
+to call him, but I can't quite make up my mouth to it--who speaks
+English, and says he has been in England. He was telling me about it, one
+day when we were drying the dishes at the refectory together. He says
+they used to have wars and trusts and trades-unions here in the old days,
+just as we do now in civilized countries.”
+
+“And you don't consider Altruria civilized?”
+
+“Well, not in just that sense of the word, ma'am. You wouldn't call
+heaven civilized?”
+
+“Well, not in just that sense of the word. Robert.”
+
+“You see, it's rum here, because, though everything seems to go so right,
+it's against human nature.”
+
+“The Altrurians say it isn't.”
+
+“I hope I don't differ from you, ma'am, but what would people--the best
+people--at home say? They would say it wasn't reasonable; they would say
+it wasn't even possible. That's what makes me think it's a dream--that
+it's rum. Begging your pardon, ma'am.”
+
+“Oh, I quite understand, Robert. Then you don't believe a camel can ever
+go through the eye of a needle?”
+
+“I don't quite see how, ma'am.”
+
+“But you are proof of as great a miracle, Robert.”
+
+“Beg your pardon, ma'am?”
+
+“Some day I will explain. But is there nothing that can make you believe
+Altruria is true here, and that it can be true anywhere?”
+
+“I have been thinking a good deal about that, ma'am. One doesn't quite
+like to go about in a dream, or think one is dreaming, and I have got to
+saying to myself that if some ship was to come here from England or
+America, or even from Germany, and we could compare our feelings with the
+feelings of people who were fresh to it, we might somehow get to believe
+that it was real.”
+
+“Yes,” I had to own. “We need fresh proofs from time to time. There was a
+ship that sailed from here something over a year ago, and the captain
+promised his crew to let them bring her back, but at times I am afraid
+that was part of the dream, too, and that we're all something I am
+dreaming about.”
+
+“Just so, ma'am,” Robert said, and I came away downhearted enough, though
+he called after me, “Mrs. Thrall will be very sorry, ma'am.”
+
+Back in the Maritime Capital, and oh, Dolly, Dolly, Dolly! They have
+sighted the _Little Sally_ from the terrace! How happy I am! There will
+be letters from you, and I shall hear all that has happened in America,
+and I shall never again doubt that Altruria is real! I don't know how I
+shall get these letters of mine back to you, but somehow it can be
+managed. Perhaps the _Saraband's_ crew will like to take the _Little
+Sally_ home again; perhaps when Mr. Thrall knows the ship is here he will
+want to buy it and go back to his money in America and the misery of it!
+Do you believe he will? Should I like to remind my husband of his promise
+to take me home on a visit? Oh, my heart misgives me! I wonder if the
+captain of the _Little Sally_ has brought his wife and children with him,
+and is going to settle among us, or whether he has just let his men have
+the vessel, and they have come to Altruria without him? I dare not ask
+anything, I dare not think anything!
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
+    <title>
+      Through the Eye of The Needle, by William Dean Howells
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
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+  </head>
+  <body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Through the Eye of the Needle, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Through the Eye of the Needle
+       A Romance
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+
+Release Date: June, 2005 [EBook #8295]
+This file was first posted on July 26, 2003
+Last Updated: February 25, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THROUGH THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Musser, Charles Franks, David Widger,
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      THROUGH THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE
+    </h1>
+    <h3>
+      A Romance
+    </h3>
+    <h4>
+      With An Introduction
+    </h4>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By William Dean Howells
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      1907
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_INTR"> INTRODUCTION </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_PART"> <b>PART FIRST</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> I </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> II </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> III </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> IV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> V </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> VI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> VII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> VIII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> IX </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> X </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> XI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> XII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0015"> XIII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0016"> XIV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0017"> XV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0018"> XVI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0019"> XVII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0020"> XVIII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> XIX </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0022"> XX </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0023"> XXI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0024"> XXII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0025"> XXIII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0026"> XXIV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0027"> XXV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0028"> XXVI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0029"> XXVII </a><br />
+    </p>
+
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_PART2"> <b>PART SECOND</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0031"> I </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0032"> II </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0033"> III </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0034"> IV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0035"> V </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0036"> VI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0037"> VII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0038"> VIII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0039"> IX </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0040"> X </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0041"> XI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0042"> XII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0043"> XIII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0044"> XIV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_INTR" id="link2H_INTR">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      INTRODUCTION
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>upon</i> each other as the Americans do, instead of
+      <i>for</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;like the sweet
+      South, taking and giving odor.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PART" id="link2H_PART">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART FIRST
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      THROUGH THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>en famille;</i>
+      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&mdash;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. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>now?</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This and the parlors count three, and the kitchen here is the fourth room
+      of the eight,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She showed me the set range, at one side, and the refrigerator in an
+      alcove, which she said went with the flat, and, &ldquo;Lena,&rdquo; she said to the
+      cook, &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The cook said, &ldquo;Oh yes, ma'am,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;Of course, it's
+      an expense,&rdquo; she said, as she closed the kitchen door after us. She added,
+      in a low, rapid tone, &ldquo;You must excuse my introducing the cook. She has
+      read all about you in the papers&mdash;you didn't know, I suppose, that
+      there were reporters that day of your delightful talk in the mountains,
+      but I had them&mdash;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,&rdquo; she ran
+      on, without a moment's pause, while she flung open another door, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes,&rdquo; I said, and she shut the elevator door and opened another a
+      little beyond it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is our guest chamber,&rdquo; she continued, as she ushered me into a very
+      pretty room, charmingly furnished. &ldquo;It isn't very light by day, for it
+      opens on a court, like the kitchen and the servants' room here,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;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.&rdquo; I did not say that I did not see, and this sufficed Mrs. Makely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I'll show you <i>our</i> rooms,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at me, and I praised the room and its dainty tastefulness to
+      her heart's content, so that she said: &ldquo;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&mdash;drawing-room. This is the end of the story.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said her husband, with a wink at me, &ldquo;I thought it was to be
+      continued in our next,&rdquo; and he nodded towards the door that opened from
+      his wife's bower into the room adjoining.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, you poor old fellow!&rdquo; she shouted. &ldquo;I forgot all about <i>your</i>
+      room,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;And here,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;he can smoke, or anything, as long as
+      he keeps the door shut. Oh, good gracious! I forgot the bath-room,&rdquo; 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.
+      &ldquo;Put out the electrics, Dick!&rdquo; she called back over her shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Now, isn't it about perfect?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see very little to criticise,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;from your point of view; but I
+      hope you won't think it indiscreet if I ask a few questions?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed. &ldquo;Ask anything, Mr. Homos! I hope I got hardened to your
+      questions in the mountains.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She said you used to get off some pretty tough ones,&rdquo; said her husband,
+      helpless to take his eyes from her, although he spoke to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is about your servants,&rdquo; I began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, of course! Perfectly characteristic! Go on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You told me that they had no natural light either in the kitchen or their
+      bedroom. Do they never see the light of day?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The lady laughed heartily. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, except for that afternoon once a week, your cook lives in
+      electric-light perpetually?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Electric-light is very healthy, and it doesn't heat the air!&rdquo; the lady
+      triumphed, &ldquo;I can assure you that she thinks she's very well off; and so
+      she is.&rdquo; I felt a little temper in her voice, and I was silent, until she
+      asked me, rather stiffly, &ldquo;Is there any <i>other</i> inquiry you would
+      like to make?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;but I do not think you would like it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, why should you require your servants to go down on a different
+      elevator from yourselves?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, good gracious!&rdquo; cried the lady.&mdash;&ldquo;aren't they different from us
+      in <i>every</i> 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 <i>front</i>
+      elevator? I don't want to go up and down with my own cook, and I certainly
+      don't with my neighbor's cook!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;It is only that in Altruria we
+      hold serving in peculiar honor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the lady, scornfully, &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Business,&rdquo; suggested her husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she assented, as if this clinched the matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's what I'm always telling you, Dolly, and yet you <i>will</i> 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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are there many seeking employment?&rdquo; I asked this because I thought it was
+      safe ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, they just stand around in the office as <i>thick!</i>&rdquo; said the
+      lady. &ldquo;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,&rdquo; she continued, with a
+      lingering ire in her voice, &ldquo;that in Altruria you do treat them as one of
+      the family?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have no servants, in the American sense,&rdquo; I answered, as inoffensively
+      as I could.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Makely irrelevantly returned to the question that had first provoked
+      her indignation. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should think it was no worse,&rdquo; I admitted, and I thought this a good
+      chance to turn the talk from the dangerous channel it had taken. &ldquo;I wish,
+      Mrs. Makely, you would tell me something about the way people live in
+      separate houses in New York.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was instantly pacified. &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed and said, &ldquo;Why, it's just like any other house!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Another contradiction!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;I
+      suppose you mean a brown-stone, four-story house in the middle of a
+      block?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I think that is what I mean,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; she began, &ldquo;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&mdash;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&mdash;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the front door,&rdquo; Mrs. Makely explained, &ldquo;where people come in,
+      and then begins the misery of a house&mdash;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&mdash;draw it, Dick&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll go back to a house yet, Dolly,&rdquo; said her husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never!&rdquo; she almost shrieked, and he winked at me, as if it were the best
+      joke in the world. &ldquo;Never, as long as houses have stairs!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Put in an elevator,&rdquo; he suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, that is what Eveleth Strange has, and she lets the servants use it,
+      too,&rdquo; and Mrs. Makely said, with a look at me: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what is an English-basement house like?&rdquo; I ventured to ask, in
+      interruption of the retrospective melancholy she had fallen into.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, <i>never</i> live in an English-basement house, if you value your
+      spine!&rdquo; cried the lady. &ldquo;An English-basement house is nothing <i>but</i>
+      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 <i>up</i>, and <i>never</i>
+      down. If I had my way, there wouldn't one stone be left upon another in
+      the English-basements in New York.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, of course,&rdquo; she began, &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ten or twelve thousand a year&mdash;fifteen,&rdquo; answered her husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, fully that,&rdquo; she answered, with an effect of disappointment in his
+      figures. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite,&rdquo; said Mr. Makely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the young people,&rdquo; I urged&mdash;&ldquo;those who are just starting in life&mdash;how
+      do they manage? Say when the husband has $1500 or $2000 a year?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor things!&rdquo; she returned. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if they didn't?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her husband nodded his acquiescence. &ldquo;Fighting-cock wouldn't be in it,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;Trouble is, we all want to do the swell thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you can't all do it,&rdquo; I ventured, &ldquo;and, from what I see of the
+      simple, out-of-the-way neighborhoods in my walks, you don't all try.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, no,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, that's all very well,&rdquo; said his wife; &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But there is no obligation to do either?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes, there is,&rdquo; she returned. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That means the woman's husband, too,&rdquo; said Mr. Makely, with his wink for
+      me. &ldquo;Always die together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;I know it,&rdquo; she
+      said. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;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 <i>won't</i> mind my laughing? Do go on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Now, I'll
+      tell you,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;After we broke up housekeeping in Thirty-third
+      Street, we stored our furniture&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Excuse me,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;How&mdash;stored?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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 <i>glad</i> 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&mdash;the storage cost as much as the
+      rent of a small house&mdash;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&mdash;excuse me, Mr. Homos: <i>domestic</i>&mdash;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.&rdquo; I have
+      found this is a favorite phrase of Mrs. Makely's, and that it seems to
+      give her a great deal of comfort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you don't feel that there's any harm in it?&rdquo; I ventured to ask.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Harm in it?&rdquo; she repeated. &ldquo;Why, aren't the poor things glad to get the
+      work? What would they do without it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From what I see of your conditions I should be afraid that they would
+      starve,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, they can't all get places in shops or restaurants, and they have to
+      do something, or starve, as you say,&rdquo; she said; and she seemed to think
+      what I had said was a concession to her position.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if it were your own case?&rdquo; I suggested. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw her flush, and she answered, haughtily, &ldquo;You must excuse me if I
+      refuse to imagine myself taking a servant's place, even for the sake of
+      argument.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you are quite right,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To my great astonishment she seemed delighted by this conclusion. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo;
+       she said, and she smiled radiantly, &ldquo;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&mdash;and everything. Besides,&rdquo;
+       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, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And it never seems to you that the whole relation is wrong?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What relation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That between maid and mistress, the hirer and the hireling.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, good gracious!&rdquo; she burst out. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It might be done for you, when you could not do it yourself, from
+      affection.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From affection!&rdquo; she returned, with the deepest derision. &ldquo;Well, I rather
+      think I <i>shall</i> have to do it myself if I want it done from
+      affection! But I suppose you think I <i>ought</i> 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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's simply business,&rdquo; her husband said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The men,&rdquo; said Mrs. Makely, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>I</i> don't, Dolly,&rdquo; suggested her husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, <i>you</i> don't, Dick,&rdquo; she returned, fondly. &ldquo;But there are not
+      many like you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He went on, with a wink at me, &ldquo;I never live at the club, except in
+      summer, when you go away to the mountains.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you know I can't very well take you with me,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I couldn't leave my business, anyway,&rdquo; he said, and he laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      X
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do many of the husbands left behind in the summer live at the club?&rdquo; I
+      asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All that <i>have</i> a club do,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He laughed, and his wife said: &ldquo;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,&rdquo; she continued, addressing me, &ldquo;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,&rdquo; she said, with that wonderful, unintentional,
+      or at least unconscious, frankness of hers, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do women go much to them?&rdquo; I asked, choosing this question as a safe one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Much</i>!&rdquo; she screamed. &ldquo;They don't go at all! They <i>can't</i>!
+      They won't <i>let</i> 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&rdquo;&mdash;she indicated her husband&mdash;&ldquo;are sitting up,
+      smoking and telling stories, it isn't to be dreamed of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her husband laughed. &ldquo;You wouldn't like the smoking, Dolly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nor the stories, some of them,&rdquo; she retorted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, the stories are always first-rate,&rdquo; he said, and he laughed more than
+      before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And they never gossip at the clubs, Mr. Homos&mdash;never!&rdquo; she added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, hardly ever,&rdquo; said her husband, with an intonation that I did not
+      understand. It seemed to be some sort of catch-phrase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All I know,&rdquo; said Mrs. Makely, &ldquo;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!&rdquo; She looked fondly at him, as if this
+      were one of the greatest merits in the world. &ldquo;But I confess I shouldn't
+      like him to be a mere club man, like some of them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, belonging to five or six, or more, even; and spending their whole
+      time at them, when they're not at business.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;And if the
+      ladies are not admitted to the men's clubs, why don't they have clubs of
+      their own?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, they have&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you go out and select the things yourself the day before, or in the
+      morning?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo; Her husband gave me one of his queer looks, and she went on: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;And that is
+      the way that people usually manage?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;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&mdash;or she did do it when she was in the country; I dare
+      say she won't when she gets back&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      But I am allowing myself to wander too far from Mrs. Makely and her
+      letter, which reached me only two days before Thanksgiving.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;MY DEAR MR. HOMOS,&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With Mr. Makely's best regards,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yours cordially,
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      &ldquo;DOROTHEA MAKELY.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Sphinx,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;November the twenty sixth,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eighteen hundred and Ninety-three.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;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
+      <i>me</i> out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed, and said: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0015" id="link2H_4_0015">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;No, a memory,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then,&rdquo; she added, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0016" id="link2H_4_0016">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;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,&rdquo; he added, in a burlesque whisper, behind
+      his hand, &ldquo;are the&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Canvasback duck?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, now,&rdquo; Mrs. Makely proclaimed, in high delight with her triumph, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0017" id="link2H_4_0017">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;You
+      must have been glad, Mrs. Strange,&rdquo; he said to the lady at my side, &ldquo;to
+      get back to our American oysters. There seems nothing else so potent to
+      bring us home from Europe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid,&rdquo; she answered, &ldquo;that I don't care so much for the American
+      oyster as I should. But I am certainly glad to get back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In time for the turkey, perhaps?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I care no more for the turkey than for the oyster of my native land,&rdquo;
+       said the lady.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I should not have missed him, either,&rdquo; persisted the lady.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What could one have missed,&rdquo; the gentleman said, with a bow to the
+      hostess, &ldquo;in the dinner Mrs. Makely has given us? If there had been
+      nothing, I should not have missed it,&rdquo; and when the laugh at his drolling
+      had subsided he asked Mrs. Strange: &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The American dinner-party,&rdquo; said the lady, with the same burlesque.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he consented, &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think we are every year a little more European,&rdquo; said the lady. &ldquo;One
+      notices it on getting home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I supposed we were so European already,&rdquo; returned the gentleman, &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, by all means!&rdquo; cried the hostess.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; I protested, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must say, I think they're both much nicer,&rdquo; said Mrs. Makely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is livelier,&rdquo; suggested Mrs. Makely, again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing of the kind!&rdquo; cried Mrs. Makely. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The gentleman laughed. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Mrs. Makely, &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You forget the American woman,&rdquo; suggested the gentleman. &ldquo;She is always
+      American, and she is always in society.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; returned our hostess, with a thoughtful air, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the gentleman, &ldquo;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 <i>you</i> think, Mr. Homos?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;How
+      does your observation coincide with my experience?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I!&rdquo; our hostess protested. But then she perceived that he was joking, and
+      she let me answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; he returned, &ldquo;that you reserve your <i>opinion</i> of our more
+      artificial society; but you may be sure that our reporters will get it out
+      of you yet before you leave us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Those horrid reporters!&rdquo; one of the ladies irrelevantly sighed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gentleman resumed: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Homos, you know,&rdquo; Mrs. Makely explained for me, as if this were the
+      aptest moment, &ldquo;thinks we all ought to work. He thinks we oughtn't to have
+      any servants.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh no, my dear lady,&rdquo; I put in. &ldquo;I don't think that of you as you <i>are</i>.
+      None of you could see more plainly than I do that in your conditions you
+      <i>must</i> have servants, and that you cannot possibly work unless
+      poverty obliges you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Sometimes,&rdquo; she
+      said, &ldquo;I wish we had to work, all of us, and that we could be freed from
+      our servile bondage to servants.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0018" id="link2H_4_0018">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XVI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+      &ldquo;Dining, you know, means overeating,&rdquo; he explained, &ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gentleman who had talked so much already said: &ldquo;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&mdash;yours was very good, Makely; I wish I had
+      taken more of it&mdash;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 <i>ad libitum</i>; 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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, then the women would insist upon our making it four-o'clock tea,&rdquo;
+       said another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;Shall we join the
+      ladies?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Makely hailed me with, &ldquo;Ah, Mr. Homos, I'm so glad you've come! We
+      poor women have been having a most dismal time!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Honestly,&rdquo; asked the funny gentleman, &ldquo;don't you always, without us?&rdquo;
+       &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A little more than kin and less than kind, perhaps,&rdquo; the gentleman
+      suggested. &ldquo;But what does she propose to do about it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned towards Mrs. Strange, who answered, &ldquo;Nothing. What does any one
+      propose to do about it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, why do you think about it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't. It thinks about itself. Do you know that poem of Longfellow's,
+      'The Challenge'?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I never heard of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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, <i>apropos de rien:</i>
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     '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.'&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; said the facetious gentleman, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0019" id="link2H_4_0019">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XVII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;But Eveleth Strange wouldn't do that,&rdquo;
+       she explained, &ldquo;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 <i>begin</i> to approve of <i>me;</i> 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&mdash;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>I</i>
+      know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0020" id="link2H_4_0020">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XVIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;that is what I find such a comfort in Mr. Twelvemough's
+      books.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We were speaking of Mr. Twelvemough's books,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The painter asked, Why was it not art?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Precisely,&rdquo; said the painter&mdash;&ldquo;art <i>is</i> choice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On that ground,&rdquo; the banker interposed, &ldquo;you could say that political
+      economy was a fit subject for art, if an artist chose to treat it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would have its difficulties,&rdquo; the painter admitted, &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>I</i> should object very much, for one,&rdquo; said the lady who had
+      objected to the account of the surgical operation. &ldquo;It would be too
+      creepy. Art should give pleasure.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you think a tragedy is not art?&rdquo; asked the painter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think that these harrowing subjects are brought in altogether too
+      much,&rdquo; said the lady. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, it wouldn't cost me any money there. I shouldn't have to give.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You oughtn't to give money in real life,&rdquo; said the lady. &ldquo;You ought to
+      give charity tickets. If the beggars refuse them, it shows they are
+      impostors.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's some comfort to know that the charities are so active,&rdquo; said the
+      elderly young lady, &ldquo;even if half the letters one gets <i>do</i> turn out
+      to be appeals from them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's very disappointing to have them do it, though,&rdquo; said the artist,
+      lightly. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Mr. Bullion, &ldquo;perhaps they have suspended during the hard
+      times.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;Who goes there?&rdquo;
+       the houselessness that prowls the night could have answered them from the
+      street below, &ldquo;Despair!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had an amusing experience,&rdquo; Mr. Twelvemough began, &ldquo;when I was doing a
+      little visiting for the charities in our ward, the other winter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For the sake of the literary material?&rdquo; the artist suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A checkered employ,&rdquo; the banker mused aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was not of a simultaneous nature,&rdquo; the novelist explained. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The novelist paused, and nobody laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems to me that your experience is instructive, rather than amusing,&rdquo;
+       said the banker. &ldquo;It shows that something can be done, if you try.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Mr. Twelvemough, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Everybody laughed now, and I looked at my hostess in a little
+      bewilderment. She murmured, &ldquo;I suppose the joke is that he had befriended
+      one man at the expense of six others.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; I returned, &ldquo;is that a joke?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No one answered, but the lady at my right asked, &ldquo;How do you manage with
+      poverty in Altruria?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw the banker fix a laughing eye on me, but I answered, &ldquo;In Altruria we
+      have no poverty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, I knew you would say that!&rdquo; he cried out. &ldquo;That's what he always
+      does,&rdquo; he explained to the lady. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the banker at last, &ldquo;if there is no cure for our poverty, we
+      might as well go on and enjoy ourselves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said our hostess, with a sad little smile, &ldquo;we might as well enjoy
+      ourselves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;Don't go! I mean it! Stay, and tell us about Altruria&mdash;my
+      mother and me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>poseuse</i> 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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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,&rdquo; she went on, with a sad mockery,
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;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 <i>have</i> a soul, you must long to help, not for a time,
+      but for all time. I suppose,&rdquo; she asked, abruptly, &ldquo;that Mrs. Makely has
+      told you something about me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something,&rdquo; I admitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ask,&rdquo; she went on, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo; She laughed again, more gayly, and recovered
+      herself in a cheerfuller and easier mood. &ldquo;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, <i>no</i> 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&mdash;to go mad and be put into an asylum, or
+      go mad and devote yourself to society.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0022" id="link2H_4_0022">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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:
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, people <i>never</i> do the charity that Christ meant,&rdquo; said Mrs.
+      Strange; &ldquo;and, as things are now, how <i>could</i> they? Who would dream
+      of dividing half her frocks and wraps with poor women, or selling <i>all</i>
+      and giving to the poor? That is what makes it so hopeless. We <i>know</i>
+      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 <i>you</i> manage about that?&rdquo;
+       she asked me; and then she added, &ldquo;But, of course, I forgot that you have
+      no need of charity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes, we have,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;dead-level of
+      equality&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Women,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;are exterior to your conditions, and they can sacrifice
+      themselves without wronging any one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or, rather,&rdquo; she continued, &ldquo;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&mdash;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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'It curseth him that gives, and him that takes.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;that Mrs. Makely told you something of my
+      marriage?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eveleth!&rdquo; her mother protested, with a gentle murmur.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is what we think,&rdquo; I ventured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eveleth!&rdquo; her mother murmured again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes,&rdquo; she answered, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0023" id="link2H_4_0023">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My husband,&rdquo; Mrs. Strange went on, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eveleth,&rdquo; said her mother, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At this protest, Mrs. Strange seemed to recover herself a little. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo;
+       she said, &ldquo;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&mdash;I don't know what&mdash;that will not let me keep
+      the truth from you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She gazed at me entreatingly, and then, as if some strong emotion swept
+      her from her own hold, she broke out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what has your conclusion been?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have seen the meaning and purport of Altruria so clearly,&rdquo; I said,
+      &ldquo;that I think I can safely leave you to guess the answer to that
+      question.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0024" id="link2H_4_0024">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0025" id="link2H_4_0025">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you excuse me, Mr. Homos,&rdquo; she began, &ldquo;if I ask you whether you
+      intend to make America your home after this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh no!&rdquo; 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.
+      &ldquo;How could I do that?&rdquo; 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.
+      &ldquo;I mean, by getting naturalized, and becoming a citizen, and taking up
+      your residence among us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; I answered, as quietly as I could, &ldquo;I had not thought of that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you still intend to go back to Altruria?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope so; I ought to have gone back long ago, and if I had not met the
+      friends I have in this house&mdash;&rdquo; I stopped, for I did not know how I
+      should end what I had begun to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am glad you think we are your friends,&rdquo; said the lady, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Say anything to me, my dear lady,&rdquo; I returned. &ldquo;I shall not think it
+      unkind, no matter how odd it is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, it's nothing. It's merely that&mdash;that when you are not here with
+      us I lose my grasp on Altruria, and&mdash;and I begin to doubt&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I smiled. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh no!&rdquo; she answered, fervently. &ldquo;Everybody that I have heard speak of
+      you has the highest regard for you, and believes you perfectly sincere.
+      But&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what?&rdquo; I entreated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They think you may be mistaken.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then they think I am out of my wits&mdash;that I am in an hallucination!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, not that,&rdquo; she returned. &ldquo;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&mdash;it seems ridiculous.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I confessed, &ldquo;I know that it seems so to the Americans.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;if you will let me have your atlas&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head. &ldquo;It would be the same again as soon as you went away.&rdquo;
+       I could not conceal my distress, and she went on: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then Mrs. Strange isn't troubled, as you are, concerning me?&rdquo; I asked,
+      and I confess my anxiety attenuated my voice almost to a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;that makes me all the
+      more anxious that she should not deceive herself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Mrs. Gray!&rdquo; I could not keep a certain tone of reproach out of my
+      words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She began to weep. &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is just it,&rdquo; she returned. &ldquo;Nobody can imagine the first Christians,
+      and do you think we can imagine anything like them in our own day?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But Mrs. Strange&mdash;she imagines us, you say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;and now I have so much more! If she is in
+      the house, won't you send to her? I can make her understand&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I stopped at a certain expression which I fancied I saw in Mrs. Gray's
+      face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Homos,&rdquo; she began, so very seriously that my heart trembled with a
+      vague misgiving, &ldquo;sometimes I think you had better not see my daughter any
+      more.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not see her any more?&rdquo; I gasped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;I am afraid that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I am not uncanny to <i>her!</i>&rdquo; I entreated. &ldquo;I am not unnatural,
+      not incredible&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She rose from her chair, and I, perforce, rose from mine and made a
+      movement towards her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I don't need any help. You must come again soon and
+      see us, and show that you've forgotten what I've said.&rdquo; She gave me her
+      hand, and I could not help bending over it and kissing it. She gave a
+      little, pathetic whimper. &ldquo;Oh, I <i>know</i> I've said the most dreadful
+      things to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You haven't said anything that takes your friendship from me, Mrs. Gray,
+      and that is what I care for.&rdquo; My own eyes filled with tears&mdash;I do not
+      know why&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are going?&rdquo; a whisper said. &ldquo;Why are you going?&rdquo; And Eveleth had me
+      by the hand and was drawing me gently into the dim drawing-room that
+      opened from the place. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, my dearest!&rdquo; I said, and why I said this I do not know, or how we
+      found ourselves in each other's arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are we doing?&rdquo; she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't believe I am an impostor, an illusion, a visionary?&rdquo; I besought
+      her, straining her closer to my heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe in you, with all my soul!&rdquo; she answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0026" id="link2H_4_0026">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;It must
+      be very weird,&rdquo; the man said; &ldquo;something like being engaged to a
+      materialization.&rdquo; &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the girl, &ldquo;quite the Demon Lover business, I
+      should think.&rdquo; 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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0027" id="link2H_4_0027">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; she explained, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;you will always be with us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then,&rdquo; she pursued, with a smile, &ldquo;when shall <i>you</i> come
+      back?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, never!&rdquo; I answered. &ldquo;No one ever leaves Altruria, if he can help it,
+      unless he is sent on a mission.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked a little mystified, and I went on: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You won't come to live in America?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God forbid!&rdquo; said I, and I am afraid I could not hide the horror that ran
+      through me at the thought. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was silent, and I asked: &ldquo;But, surely, you understood this, Mrs.
+      Gray?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said, reluctantly. &ldquo;Does Eveleth?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, certainly,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;We have talked it over a hundred times. Hasn't
+      she&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; she returned, with a vague trouble in her voice and eyes.
+      &ldquo;Perhaps I haven't understood her exactly. Perhaps&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0028" id="link2H_4_0028">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXVI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;the last long
+      evening we passed together&mdash;she said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What would you like to have me do with this house while we are gone?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do with this house?&rdquo; I echoed; and I felt as if I were standing on the
+      edge of an abyss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; shall we let it, or sell it&mdash;or what? Or give it away?&rdquo; I drew
+      a little breath at this; perhaps we had not misunderstood each other,
+      after all. She went on: &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By all means, give it away,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed at this, as if she thought I must be joking. &ldquo;It would be
+      droll, wouldn't it, to have Tammany appointees teaching Altrurianism?&rdquo;
+       Then she said, after a moment of reflection: &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I began: &ldquo;You can give <i>all</i> your money to it, my dear&mdash;&rdquo; But I
+      stopped at the bewildered look she turned on me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All?&rdquo; she repeated. &ldquo;But what should we have to live on, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We shall need no money to live on in Altruria,&rdquo; I answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, in Altruria! But when we come back to New York?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an agonizing moment, and I felt that shutting of the heart which
+      blinds the eyes and makes the brain reel. &ldquo;Eveleth,&rdquo; I gasped, &ldquo;did you
+      expect to return to New York?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, certainly!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;Not at once, of course. But after you had
+      seen your friends, and made a good, long visit&mdash;Why, surely,
+      Aristide, you don't understand that I&mdash;You didn't mean to <i>live</i>
+      in Altruria?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; I answered. &ldquo;Where else could I live? Did you think for an instant
+      that I could live in such a land as this?&rdquo; I saw that she was hurt, and I
+      hastened to say: &ldquo;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, <i>our</i> country, will never consent to
+      live in any other.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I know it must be very beautiful; but I hadn't supposed&mdash;and
+      yet I ought&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, indeed!&rdquo; she answered, generously. &ldquo;If you are to be my husband,&rdquo; and
+      here she began with the solemn words of the Bible, so beautiful in their
+      quaint English, &ldquo;'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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when we met again I could see that she had been thinking seriously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I won't give the house absolutely away,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;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&mdash;I won't give the whole house to the school&mdash;and
+      we will lecture on the later phases of Altrurian life to the pupils. How
+      will that do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll endow it,&rdquo; she went on, &ldquo;and I'll leave the rest of my money at
+      interest here; unless you think that some Altrurian securities&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; there are no such things!&rdquo; I cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was what I thought,&rdquo; she returned; &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something handsome!&rdquo; I cried. &ldquo;But, Eveleth, haven't I heard you say
+      yourself that the growth of interest from dead money was like&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes; that!&rdquo; she returned. &ldquo;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 <i>duty</i> to take the interest. How
+      should we keep up the school, and pay the teachers, and everything?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not <i>my</i> money, Eveleth!&rdquo; I entreated. &ldquo;Don't say <i>my</i> money!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But whatever is mine is yours,&rdquo; she returned, with a wounded air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She dropped upon my knee as she spoke, laughing, and put her hand under my
+      chin, to lift my fallen face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now you mustn't be a goose, Aristide, even if you <i>are</i> an angel!
+      Now listen. You <i>know</i>, don't you, that I hate money just as badly as
+      you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have made me think so, Eveleth,&rdquo; I answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You could destroy it,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not unless you were a crank,&rdquo; she returned. &ldquo;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,&rdquo; and she accented this confession
+      with a laugh that was also a kiss. &ldquo;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 <i>have</i> to do it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He doesn't do it willingly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. And <i>we</i> won't. And after a while&mdash;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No more than you could take it to heaven with you,&rdquo; I answered, solemnly;
+      but she would not let me be altogether serious about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;and&mdash;really
+      do some good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0029" id="link2H_4_0029">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXVII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I rose in a distress which I could not hide. &ldquo;Oh, Eveleth, Eveleth!&rdquo; I
+      cried. &ldquo;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&mdash;no, not me&mdash;but between love
+      and your money. You cannot keep both.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had stood listening to me; now she cast herself on my heart and
+      stopped my words with an impassioned kiss. &ldquo;Then there is no choice for
+      me. My choice is made, once for all.&rdquo; She set her hands against my breast
+      and pushed me from her. &ldquo;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&mdash;you
+      wish it, don't you?&mdash;and because I will not let you ever think I
+      acted upon an impulse, and that I regretted it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is right, Eveleth. That is like <i>you</i>&rdquo; I said, and I took her
+      into my arms for good-night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>&ldquo;You will believe that I have not slept, when you read this. </i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have thought it all over again, as you wished, and it is all over
+      between us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am what you said, the creature of my environment. I cannot detach
+      myself from it; I cannot escape from what I have been.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is no use writing; if I kept on forever, it would always be the
+      same cry of shame, of love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eveleth Strange.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have yet two days before me until the steamer sails; we were to have
+      sailed together, and now I shall sail alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was she, then, the <i>poseuse</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I shall soon see you again; and, until then, farewell.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      END OF PART I
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PART2" id="link2H_PART2">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART SECOND
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0031" id="link2H_4_0031">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;open&rdquo; Altruria, as
+      Commodore Perry &ldquo;opened&rdquo; 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 you suppose; you do not hear of them afterwards,
+      because their crews are poor, ignorant people, whose stories of their
+      adventures are always distrusted, and who know they would be laughed at if
+      they told the stories they could of a country like Altruria. My husband
+      himself took one of their vessels on her home voyage when he came to us,
+      catching the Australasian steamer at New Zealand; and now I am writing you
+      by the same sort of opportunity. I shall have time enough to write you a
+      longer letter than you will care to read; the ship does not sail for a
+      week yet, because it is so hard to get her crew together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now that I have actually made a beginning, my mind goes back so strongly
+      to that terrible night when I came to you after Aristides (I always use
+      the English form of his name now) left New York that I seem to be living
+      the tragedy over again, and this happiness of mine here is like a dream
+      which I cannot trust. It was not all tragedy, though, and I remember how
+      funny Mr. Makely was, trying to keep his face straight when the whole
+      truth had to come out, and I confessed that I had expected, without really
+      knowing it myself, that Aristides would disregard that wicked note I had
+      written him and come and make me marry him, not against my will, but
+      against my word. Of course I didn't put it in just that way, but in a way
+      to let you both guess it. The first glimmering of hope that I had was when
+      Mr. Makely said, &ldquo;Then, when a woman tells a man that all is over between
+      them forever, she means that she would like to discuss the business with
+      him?&rdquo; I was old enough to be ashamed, but it seemed to me that you and I
+      had gone back in that awful moment and were two girls together, just as we
+      used to be at school. I was proud of the way you stood up for me, because
+      I thought that if you could tolerate me after what I had confessed I could
+      not be quite a fool. I knew that I deserved at least some pity, and though
+      I laughed with Mr. Makely, I was glad of your indignation with him, and of
+      your faith in Aristides. When it came to the question of what I should do,
+      I don't know which of you I owed the most to. It was a kind of comfort to
+      have Mr. Makely acknowledge that though he regarded Aristides as a myth,
+      still he believed that he was a thoroughly <i>good</i> myth, and couldn't
+      tell a lie if he wanted to; and I loved you, and shall love you more than
+      any one else but him, for saying that Aristides was the most real man you
+      had ever met, and that if everything he said was untrue you would trust
+      him to the end of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, Dolly, it wasn't all comedy, any more than it was all tragedy, and
+      when you and I had laughed and cried ourselves to the point where there
+      was nothing for me to do but to take the next boat for Liverpool, and Mr.
+      Makely had agreed to look after the tickets and cable Aristides that I was
+      coming, there was still my poor, dear mother to deal with. There is no use
+      trying to conceal from you that she was always opposed to my husband. She
+      thought there was something uncanny about him, though she felt as we did
+      that there was nothing uncanny <i>in</i> him; but a man who pretended to
+      come from a country where there was no riches and no poverty could not be
+      trusted with any woman's happiness; and though she could not help loving
+      him, she thought I ought to tear him out of my heart, and if I could not
+      do that I ought to have myself shut up in an asylum. We had a dreadful
+      time when I told her what I had decided to do, and I was almost frantic.
+      At last, when she saw that I was determined to follow him, she yielded,
+      not because she was convinced, but because she could not give me up; I
+      wouldn't have let her if she could. I believe that the only thing which
+      reconciled her was that you and Mr. Makely believed in him, and thought I
+      had better do what I wanted to, if nothing could keep me from it. I shall
+      never, never forget Mr. Makely's goodness in coming to talk with her, and
+      how skillfully he managed, without committing himself to Altruria, to
+      declare his faith in my Altrurian. Even then she was troubled about what
+      she thought the indelicacy of my behavior in following him across the sea,
+      and she had all sorts of doubts as to how he would receive me when we met
+      in Liverpool. It wasn't very reasonable of me to say that if he cast me
+      off I should still love him more than any other human being, and his
+      censure would be more precious to me than the praise of the rest of the
+      world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose I hardly knew what I was saying, but when once I had yielded to
+      my love for him there was nothing else in life. I could not have left my
+      mother behind, but in her opposition to me she seemed like an enemy, and I
+      should somehow have <i>forced</i> her to go if she had not yielded. When
+      she did yield, she yielded with her whole heart and soul, and so far from
+      hindering me in my preparations for the voyage, I do not believe I could
+      have got off without her. She thought about everything, and it was her
+      idea to leave my business affairs entirely in Mr. Makely's hands, and to
+      trust the future for the final disposition of my property. I did not care
+      for it myself; I hated it, because it was that which had stood between me
+      and Aristides; but she foresaw that if by any wild impossibility he should
+      reject me when we met, I should need it for the life I must go back to in
+      New York. She behaved like a martyr as well as a heroine, for till we
+      reached Altruria she was a continual sacrifice to me. She stubbornly
+      doubted the whole affair, but now I must do her the justice to say that
+      she has been convinced by the fact. The best she can say of it is that it
+      is like the world of her girlhood; and she has gone back to the simple
+      life here from the artificial life in New York, with the joy of a child.
+      She works the whole day, and she would play if she had ever learned how.
+      She is a better Altrurian than I am; if there could be a bigoted Altrurian
+      my mother would be one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0032" id="link2H_4_0032">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I sent you a short letter from Liverpool, saying that by the unprecedented
+      delays of the <i>Urania</i>, which I had taken because it was the swiftest
+      boat of the Neptune line, we had failed to pass the old, ten-day,
+      single-screw Galaxy liner which Aristides had sailed in. I had only time
+      for a word to you; but a million words could not have told the agonies I
+      suffered, and when I overtook him on board the Orient Pacific steamer at
+      Plymouth, where she touched, I could just scribble off the cable sent Mr.
+      Makely before our steamer put off again. I am afraid you did not find my
+      cable very expressive, but I was glad that I did not try to say more, for
+      if I had tried I should simply have gibbered, at a shilling a gibber. I
+      expected to make amends by a whole volume of letters, and I did post a
+      dozen under one cover from Colombo. If they never reached you I am very
+      sorry, for now it is impossible to take up the threads of that time and
+      weave them into any sort of connected pattern. You will have to let me off
+      with saying that Aristides was everything that I believed he would be and
+      was never really afraid he might not be. From the moment we caught sight
+      of each other at Plymouth, he at the rail of the steamer and I on the deck
+      of the tender, we were as completely one as we are now. I never could tell
+      how I got aboard to him; whether he came down and brought me, or whether I
+      was simply rapt through the air to his side. It would have been
+      embarrassing if we had not treated the situation frankly; but such odd
+      things happen among the English going out to their different colonies that
+      our marriage, by a missionary returning to his station, was not even a
+      nine days' wonder with our fellow-passengers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were a good deal more than nine days on the steamer before we could get
+      a vessel that would take us on to Altruria; but we overhauled a ship going
+      there for provisions at last, and we were all put off on her, bag and
+      baggage, with three cheers from the friends we were leaving; I think they
+      thought we were going to some of the British islands that the Pacific is
+      full of. I had been thankful from the first that I had not brought a maid,
+      knowing the Altrurian prejudice against hireling service, but I never was
+      so glad as I was when we got aboard that vessel, for when the captain's
+      wife, who was with him, found that I had no one to look after me, she
+      looked after me herself, just for the fun of it, she said; but <i>I</i>
+      knew it was the love of it. It was a sort of general trading-ship,
+      stopping at the different islands in the South Seas, and had been a year
+      out from home, where the kind woman had left her little ones; she cried
+      over their photographs to me. Her husband had been in Altruria before, and
+      he and Aristides were old acquaintances and met like brothers; some of the
+      crew knew him, too, and the captain relaxed discipline so far as to let us
+      shake hands with the second-mate as the men's representative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I needn't dwell on the incidents of our home-coming&mdash;for that was
+      what it seemed for my mother and me as well as for my husband&mdash;but I
+      must give you one detail of our reception, for I still think it almost the
+      prettiest thing that has happened to us among the millions of pretty
+      things. Aristides had written home of our engagement, and he was expected
+      with his American wife; and before we came to anchor the captain ran up
+      the Emissary's signal, which my husband gave him, and then three boats
+      left the shore and pulled rapidly out to us. As they came nearer I saw the
+      first Altrurian costumes in the lovely colors that the people wear here,
+      and that make a group of them look like a flower-bed; and then I saw that
+      the boats were banked with flowers along the gunwales from stem to stern,
+      and that they were each not <i>manned,</i> but <i>girled</i> by six
+      rowers, who pulled as true a stroke as I ever saw in our boat-races. When
+      they caught sight of us, leaning over the side, and Aristides lifted his
+      hat and waved it to them, they all stood their oars upright, and burst
+      into a kind of welcome song: I had been dreading one of those stupid,
+      banging salutes of ten or twenty guns, and you can imagine what a relief
+      it was. They were great, splendid creatures, as tall as our millionaires'
+      tallest daughters, and as strong-looking as any of our college-girl
+      athletes; and when we got down over the ship's side, and Aristides said a
+      few words of introduction for my mother and me, as we stepped into the
+      largest of the boats, I thought they would crush me, catching me in their
+      strong, brown arms, and kissing me on each cheek; they never kiss on the
+      mouth in Altruria. The girls in the other boats kissed their hands to
+      mother and me, and shouted to Aristides, and then, when our boat set out
+      for the shore, they got on each side of us and sang song after song as
+      they pulled even stroke with our crew. Half-way, we met three other boats,
+      really <i>manned,</i> these ones, and going out to get our baggage, and
+      then you ought to have heard the shouting and laughing, that ended in more
+      singing, when the young fellows' voices mixed with the girls, till they
+      were lost in the welcome that came off to us from the crowded quay, where
+      I should have thought half Altruria had gathered to receive us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was afraid it was going to be too much for my mother, but she stood it
+      bravely; and almost at a glance people began to take her into
+      consideration, and she was delivered over to two young married ladies, who
+      saw that she was made comfortable, the first of any, in the pretty
+      Regionic guest-house where they put us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wish I could give you a notion of that guest-house, with its cool, quiet
+      rooms, and its lawned and gardened enclosure, and a little fountain
+      purring away among the flowers! But what astonished me was that there were
+      no sort of carriages, or wheeled conveyances, which, after our escort from
+      the ship, I thought might very well have met the returning Emissary and
+      his wife. They made my mother get into a litter, with soft cushions and
+      with lilac curtains blowing round it, and six girls carried her up to the
+      house; but they seemed not to imagine my not walking, and, in fact, I
+      could hardly have imagined it myself, after the first moment of queerness.
+      That walk was full of such rich experience for every one of the senses
+      that I would not have missed a step of it; but as soon as I could get
+      Aristides alone I asked him about horses, and he said that though horses
+      were still used in farm work, not a horse was allowed in any city or
+      village of Altruria, because of their filthiness. As for public vehicles,
+      they used to have electric trolleys; in the year that he had been absent
+      they had substituted electric motors; but these were not running, because
+      it was a holiday on which we had happened to arrive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was another incident of my first day which I think will amuse you,
+      knowing how I have always shrunk from any sort of public appearances. When
+      Aristides went to make his report to the people assembled in a sort of
+      convention, I had to go too, and take part in the proceedings; for women
+      are on an entire equality with the men here, and people would be shocked
+      if husband and wife were separated in their public life. They did not
+      spare me a single thing. Where Aristides was not very clear, or rather not
+      full enough, in describing America, I was called on to supplement, and I
+      had to make several speeches. Of course, as I spoke in English, he had to
+      put it into Altrurian for me, and it made the greatest excitement. The
+      Altrurians are very lively people, and as full of the desire to hear some
+      new things as Paul said the men of Athens were. At times they were in a
+      perfect gale of laughter at what we told them about America. Afterwards
+      some of the women confessed to me that they liked to hear us speaking
+      English together; it sounded like the whistling of birds or the shrilling
+      of locusts. But they were perfectly kind, and though they laughed it was
+      clear that they laughed at what we were saying, and never at us, or at
+      least never at <i>me</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course there was the greatest curiosity to know what Aristides' wife
+      looked like, as well as sounded like; he had written out about our
+      engagement before I broke it; and my clothes were of as much interest As
+      myself, or more. You know how I had purposely left my latest Paris things
+      behind, so as to come as simply as possible to the simple life of
+      Altruria, but still with my big leg-of-mutton sleeves, and my picture-hat,
+      and my pinched waist, I felt perfectly grotesque, and I have no doubt I
+      looked it. They had never seen a lady from the capitalistic world before,
+      but only now and then a whaling-captain's wife who had come ashore; and I
+      knew they were burning to examine my smart clothes down to the last button
+      and bit of braid. I had on the short skirts of last year, and I could feel
+      ten thousand eyes fastened on my high-heeled boots, which you know <i>I</i>
+      never went to extremes in. I confess my face burned a little, to realize
+      what a scarecrow I must look, when I glanced round at those Altrurian
+      women, whose pretty, classic fashions made the whole place like a field of
+      lilacs and irises, and knew that they were as comfortable as they were
+      beautiful. Do you remember some of the descriptions of the undergraduate
+      maidens in the &ldquo;Princess&rdquo;&mdash;I know you had it at school&mdash;where
+      they are sitting in the palace halls together? The effect was something
+      like that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You may be sure that I got out of my things as soon as I could borrow an
+      Altrurian costume, and now my Paris confections are already hung up for
+      monuments, as Richard III. says, in the Capitalistic Museum, where people
+      from the outlying Regions may come and study them as object-lessons in
+      what not to wear. (You remember what you said Aristides told you, when he
+      spoke that day at the mountains, about the Regions that Altruria is
+      divided into? This is the Maritime Region, and the city where we are
+      living for the present is the capital.) You may think this was rather hard
+      on me, and at first it did seem pretty intimate, having my things in a
+      long glass case, and it gave me a shock to see them, as if it had been my
+      ghost, whenever I passed them. But the fact is I was more ashamed than
+      hurt&mdash;they were so ugly and stupid and useless. I could have borne my
+      Paris dress and my picture-hat if it had not been for those ridiculous
+      high-heeled, pointed-toe shoes, which the Curatress had stood at the
+      bottom of the skirts. They looked the most frantic things you can imagine,
+      and the mere sight of them made my poor feet <i>ache</i> in the beautiful
+      sandals I am wearing now; when once you have put on sandals you say
+      good-bye and good-riddance to shoes. In a single month my feet have grown
+      almost a tenth as large again as they were, and my friends here encourage
+      me to believe that they will yet measure nearly the classic size, though,
+      as you know, I am not in my first youth and can't expect them to do
+      miracles.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      I had to leave off abruptly at the last page because Aristides had come in
+      with a piece of news that took my mind off everything else. I am afraid
+      you are not going to get this letter even at the late date I had set for
+      its reaching you, my dear. It seems that there has been a sort of mutiny
+      among the crew of our trader, which was to sail next week, and now there
+      is no telling when she will sail. Ever since she came the men have been
+      allowed their liberty, as they call it, by watches, but the last watch
+      came ashore this week before another watch had returned to the ship, and
+      now not one of the sailors will go back. They had been exploring the
+      country by turns, at their leisure, it seems, and their excuse is that
+      they like Altruria better than America, which they say they wish never to
+      see again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You know (though I didn't, till Aristides explained to me) that in any
+      European country the captain in such a case would go to his consul, and
+      the consul would go to the police, and the police would run the men down
+      and send them back to the ship in irons as deserters, or put them in jail
+      till the captain was ready to sail, and then deliver them up to him. But
+      it seems that there is no law in Altruria to do anything of the kind; the
+      only law here that would touch the case is one which obliges any citizen
+      to appear and answer the complaint of any other citizen before the
+      Justiciary Assembly. A citizen cannot be imprisoned for anything but the
+      rarest offence, like killing a person in a fit of passion; and as to
+      seizing upon men who are guilty of nothing worse than wanting to be left
+      to the pursuit of happiness, as all the Altrurians are, there is no
+      statute and no usage for it. Aristides says that the only thing which can
+      be done is to ask the captain and the men to come to the Assembly and each
+      state his case. The Altrurians are not anxious to have the men stay, not
+      merely because they are coarse, rude, or vicious, but because they think
+      they ought to go home and tell the Americans what they have seen and heard
+      here, and try and get them to found an Altrurian Commonwealth of their
+      own. Still they will not compel them to go, and the magistrates do not
+      wish to rouse any sort of sentiment against them. They feel that the men
+      are standing on their natural rights, which they could not abdicate if
+      they would. I know this will appear perfectly ridiculous to Mr. Makely,
+      and I confess myself that there seems something binding in a contract
+      which ought to act on the men's consciences, at least.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0033" id="link2H_4_0033">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Well, my dear Dorothea, the hearing before the Assembly is over, and it
+      has left us just where it found us, as far as the departure of our trader
+      is concerned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How I wish you could have been there! The hearing lasted three days, and I
+      would not have missed a minute of it. As it was, I did not miss a
+      syllable, and it was so deeply printed on my mind that I believe I could
+      repeat it word for word if I had to. But, in the first place, I must try
+      and realize the scene to you. I was once summoned as a witness in one of
+      our courts, you remember, and I have never forgotten the horror of it: the
+      hot, dirty room, with its foul air, the brutal spectators, the policemen
+      stationed among them to keep them in order, the lawyers with the plaintiff
+      and defendant seated all at one table, the uncouth abruptness of the
+      clerks and janitors, or whatever, the undignified magistrate, who looked
+      as if his lunch had made him drowsy, and who seemed half asleep, as he
+      slouched in his arm-chair behind his desk. Instead of such a setting as
+      this, you must imagine a vast marble amphitheatre, larger than the
+      Metropolitan Opera, by three or four times, all the gradines overflowing
+      (that is the word for the &ldquo;liquefaction of the clothes&rdquo; which poured over
+      them), and looking like those Bermudan waters where the colors of the
+      rainbow seem dropped around the coast. On the platform, or stage, sat the
+      Presidents of the Assembly, and on a tier of seats behind and above them,
+      the national Magistrates, who, as this is the capital of the republic for
+      the time being, had decided to be present at the hearing, because they
+      thought the case so very important. In the hollow space, just below (like
+      that where you remember the Chorus stood in that Greek play which we saw
+      at Harvard ages ago), were the captain and the first-mate on one hand, and
+      the seamen on the other; the second-mate, our particular friend, was not
+      there because he never goes ashore anywhere, and had chosen to remain with
+      the black cook in charge of the ship. The captain's wife would rather have
+      stayed with them, but I persuaded her to come to us for the days of the
+      hearing, because the captain had somehow thought we were opposed to him,
+      and because I thought she ought to be there to encourage him by her
+      presence. She sat next to me, in a hat which I wish you could have seen,
+      Dolly, and a dress which would have set your teeth on edge; but inside of
+      them I knew she was one of the best souls in the world, and I loved her
+      the more for being the sight she was among those wonderful Altrurian
+      women.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The weather was perfect, as it nearly always is at this time of year&mdash;warm,
+      yet fresh, with a sky of that &ldquo;bleu impossible&rdquo; of the Riviera on the
+      clearest day. Some people had parasols, but they put them down as soon as
+      the hearing began, and everybody could see perfectly. You would have
+      thought they could not hear so well, but a sort of immense sounding-plane
+      was curved behind the stage, so that not a word of the testimony on either
+      side was lost to me in English. The Altrurian translation was given the
+      second day of the hearing through a megaphone, as different in tone from
+      the thing that the man in the Grand Central Station bellows the trains
+      through as the <i>vox-humana</i> stop of an organ is different from the
+      fog-horn of a light-house. The captain's wife was bashful, in her odd
+      American dress, but we had got seats near the tribune, rather out of
+      sight, and there was nothing to hinder our hearing, like the <i>frou-frou</i>
+      of stiff silks or starched skirts (which I am afraid we poor things in
+      America like to make when we move) from the soft, filmy tissues that the
+      Altrurian women wear; but I must confess that there was a good deal of
+      whispering while the captain and the men were telling their stories. But,
+      no one except the interpreters, who were taking their testimony down in
+      short-hand, to be translated into Altrurian and read at the subsequent
+      hearing, could understand what they were saying, and so nobody was
+      disturbed by the murmurs. The whispering was mostly near me, where I sat
+      with the captain's wife, for everybody I knew got as close as they could
+      and studied my face when they thought anything important or significant
+      had been said. They are very quick at reading faces here; in fact, a great
+      deal of the conversation is carried on in that way, or with the visible
+      speech; and my Altrurian friends knew almost as well as I did when the
+      speakers came to an interesting point. It was rather embarrassing for me,
+      though, with the poor captain's wife at my side, to tell them, in my
+      broken Altrurian, what the men were accusing the captain of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I talk of the men, but it was really only one of them who at first, by
+      their common consent, spoke for the rest. He was a middle-aged Yankee, and
+      almost the only born American among them, for you know that our sailors,
+      nowadays, are of every nationality under the sun&mdash;Portuguese,
+      Norwegians, Greeks, Italians, Kanucks, and Kanakas, and even Cape Cod
+      Indians. He said he guessed his story was the story of most sailors, and
+      he had followed the sea his whole life. His story was dreadful, and I
+      tried to persuade the captain's wife not to come to the hearing the next
+      day, when it was to be read in Altrurian; but she would come. I was afraid
+      she would be overwhelmed by the public compassion, and would not know what
+      to do; for when something awful that the sailor had said against the
+      captain was translated the women, all about us cooed their sympathy with
+      her, and pressed her hand if they could, or patted her on the shoulder, to
+      show how much they pitied her. In Altruria they pity the friends of those
+      who have done wrong, and sometimes even the wrong-doers themselves; and it
+      is quite a luxury, for there is so little wrong-doing here: I tell them
+      that in America they would have as much pitying to do as they could
+      possibly ask. After the hearing that day my friends, who were of a good
+      many different Refectories, as we call them here, wanted her to go and
+      lunch with them; but I got her quietly home with me, and after she had had
+      something to eat I made her lie down awhile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You won't care to have me go fully into the affair. The sailors' spokesman
+      told how he had been born on a farm, where he had shared the family
+      drudgery and poverty till he grew old enough to run away. He meant to go
+      to sea, but he went first to a factory town and worked three or four years
+      in the mills. He never went back to the farm, but he sent a little money
+      now and then to his mother; and he stayed on till he got into trouble. He
+      did not say just what kind of trouble, but I fancied it was some sort of
+      love-trouble; he blamed himself for it; and when he left that town to get
+      away from the thought of it, as much as anything, and went to work in
+      another town, he took to drink; then, once, in a drunken spree, he found
+      himself in New York without knowing how. But it was in what he called a
+      sailors' boarding-house, and one morning, after he had been drinking
+      overnight &ldquo;with a very pleasant gentleman,&rdquo; he found himself in the
+      forecastle of a ship bound for Holland, and when the mate came and cursed
+      him up and cursed him out he found himself in the foretop. I give it
+      partly in his own language, because I cannot help it; and I only wish I
+      could give it wholly in his language; it was so graphic and so full of
+      queer Yankee humor. From that time on, he said, he had followed the sea;
+      and at sea he was always a good temperance man, but Altruria was the only
+      place he had ever kept sober ashore. He guessed that was partly because
+      there was nothing to drink but unfermented grape-juice, and partly because
+      there was nobody to drink with; anyhow, he had not had a drop here.
+      Everywhere else, as soon as he left his ship, he made for a sailors'
+      boarding-house, and then he did not know much till he found himself aboard
+      ship and bound for somewhere that he did not know of. He was always, he
+      said, a stolen man, as much as a negro captured on the west coast of
+      Africa and sold to a slaver; and, he said, it was a slave's life he led
+      between drinks, whether it was a long time or short. He said he would ask
+      his mates if it was very different with them, and when he turned to them
+      they all shouted back, in their various kinds of foreign accents, No, it
+      was just the same with them, every one. Then he said that was how he came
+      to ship on our captain's vessel, and though they could not all say the
+      same, they nodded confirmation as far as he was concerned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The captain looked sheepish enough at this, but he looked sorrowful, too,
+      as if he could have wished it had been different, and he asked the man if
+      he had been abused since he came on board. Well, the man said, not unless
+      you called tainted salt-horse and weevilly biscuit abuse; and then the
+      captain sat down again, and I could feel his poor wife shrinking beside
+      me. The man said that he was comparatively well off on the captain's ship,
+      and the life was not half such a dog's life as he had led on other
+      vessels; but it was such that when he got ashore here in Altruria, and saw
+      how <i>white</i> people lived, people that <i>used</i> each other white,
+      he made up his mind that he would never go hack to any ship alive. He
+      hated a ship so much that if he could go home to America as a first-class
+      passenger on a Cunard liner, John D. Rockefeller would not have money
+      enough to hire him to do it. He was going to stay in Altruria till he
+      died, if they would let him, and he guessed they would, if what he had
+      heard about them was true. He just wanted, he said, while we were about
+      it, to have a few of his mates tell their experience, not so much on board
+      the <i>Little Sally</i>, but on shore, and since they could remember; and
+      one after another did get up and tell their miserable stories. They were
+      like the stories you sometimes read in your paper over your coffee, or
+      that you can hear any time you go into the congested districts in New
+      York; but I assure you, my dear, they seemed to me perfectly incredible
+      here, though I had known hundreds of such stories at home. As I realized
+      their facts I forgot where I was; I felt that I was back again in that
+      horror, where it sometimes seemed to me I had no right to be fed or
+      clothed or warm or clean in the midst of the hunger and cold and nakedness
+      and dirt, and where I could only reconcile myself to my comfort because I
+      knew my discomfort would not help others' misery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I can hardly tell how, but even the first day a sense of something
+      terrible spread through that multitude of people, to whom the words
+      themselves were mere empty sounds. The captain sat through it, with his
+      head drooping, till his face was out of sight, and the tears ran silently
+      down his wife's cheeks; and the women round me were somehow awed into
+      silence. When the men ended, and there seemed to be no one else to say
+      anything on that side, the captain jumped to his feet, with a sort of
+      ferocious energy, and shouted out, &ldquo;Are you all through, men?&rdquo; and their
+      spokesman answered, &ldquo;Ay, ay, sir!&rdquo; and then the captain flung back his
+      grizzled hair and shook his fist towards the sailors. &ldquo;And do you think I
+      <i>wanted</i> to do it? Do you think I <i>liked</i> to do it? Do you think
+      that if I hadn't been <i>afraid</i> my whole life long I would have had
+      the <i>heart</i> to lead you the dog's life I know I've led you? I've been
+      as poor as the poorest of you, and as low down as the lowest; I was born
+      in the town poor-house, and I've been so afraid of the poor-house all my
+      days that I hain't had, as you may say, a minute's peace. Ask my wife,
+      there, what sort of a man I <i>am</i>, and whether I'm the man, <i>really</i>
+      the man that's been hard and mean to you the way I know I been. It was
+      because I was <i>afraid</i>, and because a coward is always hard and mean.
+      I been afraid, ever since I could remember anything, of coming to want,
+      and I was willing to see other men suffer so I could make sure that me and
+      mine shouldn't suffer. That's the way we do at home, ain't it? That's in
+      the day's work, ain't it? That's playing the game, ain't it, for
+      everybody? You can't say it ain't.&rdquo; He stopped, and the men's spokesman
+      called back, &ldquo;Ay, ay, sir,&rdquo; as he had done before, and as I had often
+      heard the men do when given an order on the ship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The captain gave a kind of sobbing laugh, and went on in a lower tone.
+      &ldquo;Well, I know you ain't going back. I guess I didn't expect it much from
+      the start, and I guess I'm not surprised.&rdquo; Then he lifted his head and
+      shouted, &ldquo;And do you suppose <i>I</i> want to go back? Don't you suppose
+      <i>I</i> would like to spend the rest of my days, too, among <i>white</i>
+      people, people that <i>use</i> each other white, as you say, and where
+      there ain't any want or, what's worse, <i>fear</i> of want? Men! There
+      ain't a day, or an hour, or a minute, when I don't think how awful it is
+      over there, where I got to be either some man's slave or some man's
+      master, as much so as if it was down in the ship's articles. My wife ain't
+      so, because she ain't been ashore here. I wouldn't let her; I was afraid
+      to let her see what a white man's country really was, because I felt so
+      weak about it myself, and I didn't want to put the trial on her, too. And
+      do you know <i>why</i> we're going back, or want to go? I guess some of
+      you know, but I want to tell these folks here so they'll understand, and I
+      want you, Mr. Homos,&rdquo; he called to my husband, &ldquo;to get it down straight.
+      It's because we've got two little children over there, that we left with
+      their grandmother when my wife come with me this voyage because she had
+      lung difficulty and wanted to see whether she could get her health back.
+      Nothing else on God's green earth could take me back to America, and I
+      guess it couldn't my wife if she knew what Altruria was as well as I do.
+      But when I went around here and saw how everything was, and remembered how
+      it was at home, I just said, 'She'll stay on the ship.' Now, that's all I
+      got to say, though I thought I had a lot more. I guess it'll be enough for
+      these folks, and they can judge between us.&rdquo; Then the captain sat down,
+      and to make a long story short, the facts of the hearing were repeated in
+      Altrurian the next day by megaphone, and when the translation was finished
+      there was a general rush for the captain. He plainly expected to be
+      lynched, and his wife screamed out, &ldquo;Oh, don't hurt him! He isn't a bad
+      man!&rdquo; But it was only the Altrurian way with a guilty person: they wanted
+      to let him know how sorry they were for him, and since his sin had found
+      him out how hopeful they were for his redemption. I had to explain it to
+      the sailors as well as to the captain and his wife, but I don't believe
+      any of them quite accepted the fact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The third day of the hearing was for the rendering of the decision, first
+      in Altrurian, and then in English. The verdict of the magistrates had to
+      be confirmed by a standing vote of the people, and of course the women
+      voted as well as the men. The decision was that the sailors should be
+      absolutely free to go or stay, but they took into account the fact that it
+      would be cruel to keep the captain and his wife away from their little
+      ones, and the sailors might wish to consider this. If they still remained
+      true to their love of Altruria they could find some means of returning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the translator came to this point their spokesman jumped to his feet
+      and called out to the captain, &ldquo;Will you <i>do</i> it?&rdquo; &ldquo;Do what?&rdquo; he
+      asked, getting slowly to his own feet. &ldquo;Come back with us after you have
+      seen the kids?&rdquo; The captain shook his fist at the sailors; it seemed to be
+      the only gesture he had with them. &ldquo;Give me the <i>chance!</i> All I want
+      is to see the children and bring them out with me to Altruria, and the old
+      folks with them.&rdquo; &ldquo;Will you <i>swear</i> it? Will you say, 'I hope I may
+      find the kids dead and buried when I get home if I don't do it'?&rdquo; &ldquo;I'll
+      take that oath, or any oath you want me to.&rdquo; &ldquo;Shake hands on it, then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two men met in front of the tribunal and clasped hands there, and
+      their reconciliation did not need translation. Such a roar of cheers went
+      up! And then the whole assembly burst out in the national Altrurian
+      anthem, &ldquo;Brothers All.&rdquo; I wish you could have heard it! But when the terms
+      of the agreement were explained, the cheering that had gone before was a
+      mere whisper to what followed. One orator after another rose and praised
+      the self-sacrifice of the sailors. I was the proudest when the last of
+      them referred to Aristides and the reports which he had sent home from
+      America, and said that without some such study as he had made of the
+      American character they never could have understood such an act as they
+      were now witnessing. Illogical and insensate as their system was, their
+      character sometimes had a beauty, a sublimity which was not possible to
+      Altrurians even, for it was performed in the face of risks and chances
+      which their happy conditions relieved them from. At the same time, the
+      orator wished his hearers to consider the essential immorality of the act.
+      He said that civilized men had no right to take these risks and chances.
+      The sailors were perhaps justified, in so far as they were homeless,
+      wifeless, and childless men; but it must not be forgotten that their
+      heroism was like the reckless generosity of savages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The men have gone back to the ship, and she sails this afternoon. I have
+      persuaded the captain to let his wife stay to lunch with me at our
+      Refectory, where the ladies wish to bid her good-bye, and I am hurrying
+      forward this letter so that she can take it on board with her this
+      afternoon. She has promised to post it on the first Pacific steamer they
+      meet, or if they do not meet any to send it forward to you with a
+      special-delivery stamp as soon as they reach Boston. She will also forward
+      by express an Altrurian costume, such as I am now wearing, sandals and
+      all! Do put it on, Dolly, dear, for my sake, and realize what it is for
+      once in your life to be a <i>free</i> woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heaven knows when I shall have another chance of getting letters to you.
+      But I shall live in hopes, and I shall set down my experiences here for
+      your benefit, not perhaps as I meet them, but as I think of them, and you
+      must not mind having a rather cluttered narrative. To-morrow we are
+      setting off on our round of the capitals, where Aristides is to make a
+      sort of public report to the people of the different Regions on the
+      working of the capitalistic conditions as he observed them among us. But I
+      don't expect to send you a continuous narrative of our adventures.
+      Good-bye, dearest, with my mother's love, and my husband's as well as my
+      own, to both of you; think of me as needing nothing but a glimpse of you
+      to complete my happiness. How I should like to tell you fully about it!
+      You <i>must</i> come to Altruria!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I came near letting this go without telling you of one curious incident of
+      the affair between the captain and his men. Before the men returned to the
+      ship they came with their spokesman to say good-bye to Aristides and me,
+      and he remarked casually that it was just as well, maybe, to be going
+      back, because, for one thing, they would know then whether it was real or
+      not. I asked him what he meant, and he said, &ldquo;Well, you know, some of the
+      mates think it's a dream here, or it's too good to be true. As far forth
+      as I go, I'd be willing to have it a dream that I didn't ever have to wake
+      up from. It ain't any too good to be true for me. Anyway, I'm going to get
+      back somehow, and give it another chance to be a fact.&rdquo; Wasn't that
+      charming? It had a real touch of poetry in it, but it was prose that
+      followed. I couldn't help asking him whether there had been nothing to mar
+      the pleasure of their stay in Altruria, and he answered: &ldquo;Well, I don't
+      know as you could rightly say <i>mar;</i> it hadn't ought to have. You
+      see, it was like this. You see, some of the mates wanted to lay off and
+      have a regular bange, but that don't seem to be the idea here. After we
+      had been ashore a day or two they set us to work at different jobs, or
+      wanted to. The mates didn't take hold very lively, and some of 'em didn't
+      take hold a bit. But after that went on a couple of days, there wa'n't any
+      breakfast one morning, and come noontime there wa'n't any dinner, and as
+      far forth as they could make out they had to go to bed without supper.
+      Then they called a halt, and tackled one of your head men here that could
+      speak some English. He didn't answer them right off the reel, but he got
+      out his English Testament and he read 'em a verse that said, 'For even
+      when we were with you this we commanded you, that if any one would not
+      work neither should he eat.' That kind of fetched 'em, and after that
+      there wa'n't any sojerin', well not to speak of. They saw he meant
+      business. I guess it did more than any one thing to make 'em think they
+      wa'n't dreamin'.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0034" id="link2H_4_0034">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      You must not think, Dolly, from anything I have been telling you that the
+      Altrurians are ever harsh. Sometimes they cannot realize how things really
+      are with us, and how what seems grotesque and hideous to them seems
+      charming and beautiful, or at least <i>chic</i>, to us. But they are
+      wonderfully quick to see when they have hurt you the least, and in the
+      little sacrifices I have made of my wardrobe to the cause of general
+      knowledge there has not been the least urgence from them. When I now look
+      at the things I used to wear, where they have been finally placed in the
+      ethnological department of the Museum, along with the Esquiman kyaks and
+      the Thlinkeet totems, they seem like things I wore in some prehistoric age&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When wild in woods the noble savage ran.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, am I being unkind? Well, you mustn't mind me, Dolly. You must just
+      say, &ldquo;She <i>has</i> got it bad,&rdquo; and go on and learn as much about
+      Altruria as you can from me. Some of the things were hard to get used to,
+      and at first seemed quite impossible. For one thing, there was the matter
+      of service, which is dishonorable with us, and honorable with the
+      Altrurians: I was a long time getting to understand that, though I knew it
+      perfectly well from hearing my husband talk about it in New York. I
+      believe he once came pretty near offending you by asking why you did not
+      do your own work, or something like that; he has confessed as much, and I
+      could not wonder at you in your conditions. Why, when we first went to the
+      guest-house, and the pretty young girls who brought in lunch sat down at
+      table to eat it with us, I felt the indignation making me hot all over.
+      You know how democratic I am, and I did not mind those great, splendid
+      boat-girls hugging and kissing me, but I instinctively drew the line at
+      cooks and waitresses. In New York, you know, I always tried to be kind to
+      my servants, but as for letting one of them sit down in my presence, much
+      less sit down at table with me, I never dreamed of such a thing in my most
+      democratic moments. Luckily I drew the line subjectively here, and later I
+      found that these young ladies were daughters of some of the most
+      distinguished men and women on the continent, though you must not
+      understand distinction as giving any sort of social primacy; that sort of
+      thing is not allowed in Altruria. They had drawn lots with the girls in
+      the Regionic school here, and were proud of having won the honor of
+      waiting on us. Of course, I needn't say they were what we would have felt
+      to be ladies anywhere, and their manners were exquisite, even to leaving
+      us alone together as soon as we had finished luncheon. The meal itself was
+      something I shall always remember for its delicious cooking of the
+      different kinds of mushrooms which took the place of meat, and the
+      wonderful salads, and the temperate and tropical fruits which we had for
+      dessert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They had to talk mostly with my husband, of course, and when they did talk
+      to me it was through him. They were very intelligent about our world, much
+      more than we are about Altruria, though, of course, it was by deduction
+      from premises rather than specific information, and they wanted to ask a
+      thousand questions; but they saw the joke of it, and laughed with us when
+      Aristides put them off with a promise that if they would have a public
+      meeting appointed we would appear and answer all the questions anybody
+      could think of; we were not going to waste our answers on them the first
+      day. He wanted them to let us go out and help wash the dishes, but they
+      would not hear of it. I confess I was rather glad of that, for it seemed a
+      lower depth to which I could not descend, even after eating with them. But
+      they invited us out to look at the kitchen, after they had got it in order
+      a little, and when we joined them there, whom should I see but my own dear
+      old mother, with an apron up to her chin, wiping the glass and watching
+      carefully through her dear old spectacles that she got everything bright!
+      You know she was of a simpler day than ours, and when she was young she
+      used to do her own work, and she and my father always washed the dishes
+      together after they had company. I merely said, &ldquo;<i>Well</i>, mother!&rdquo; and
+      she laughed and colored, and said she guessed she should like it in
+      Altruria, for it took her back to the America she used to know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I must mention things as they come into my head, and not in any regular
+      order; there are too many of them. One thing is that I did not notice till
+      afterwards that we had had no meat that first day at luncheon&mdash;the
+      mushrooms were so delicious, and you know I never was much of a
+      meat-eater. It was not till we began to make our present tour of the
+      Regionic capitals, where Aristides has had to repeat his account of
+      American civilization until I am sick as well as ashamed of America, that
+      I first felt a kind of famine which I kept myself from recognizing as long
+      as I could. Then I had to own to myself, long before I owned it to him,
+      that I was hungry for <i>meat</i>&mdash;for roast, for broiled, for fried,
+      for hashed. I did not actually tell him, but he found it out, and I could
+      not deny it, though I felt such an ogre in it. He was terribly grieved,
+      and blamed himself for not having thought of it, and wished he had got
+      some canned meats from the trader before she left the port. He was really
+      in despair, for nobody since the old capitalistic times had thought of
+      killing sheep or cattle for food; they have them for wool and milk and
+      butter; and of course when I looked at them in the fields it did seem
+      rather formidable. You are so used to seeing them in the butchers' shops,
+      ready for the range, that you never think of what they have to <i>go
+      through</i> before that. But at last I managed to gasp out, one day, &ldquo;If I
+      could only have a chicken!&rdquo; and he seemed to think that it could be
+      managed. I don't know how he made interest with the authorities, or how
+      the authorities prevailed on a farmer to part with one of his precious
+      pullets; but the thing was done somehow, and two of the farmer's children
+      brought it to us at one of the guest-houses where we were staying, and
+      then fled howling. That was bad enough, but what followed was worse. I
+      went another day on mushrooms before I had the heart to say chicken again
+      and suggest that Aristides should get it killed and dressed. The poor
+      fellow did try, I believe, but we had to fall back upon ourselves for the
+      murderous deed, and&mdash;Did you ever see a chicken have its head cut
+      off, and how hideously it behaves? It made us both wish we were dead; and
+      the sacrifice of that one pullet was quite enough for me. We buried the
+      poor thing under the flowers of the guest-house garden, and I went back to
+      my mushrooms after a visit of contrition to the farmer and many attempts
+      to bring his children to forgiveness. After all, the Altrurian mushrooms
+      are wonderfully nourishing, and they are in such variety that, what with
+      other succulent vegetables and the endless range of fruits and nuts, one
+      does not wish for meat&mdash;meat that one has killed one's self!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0035" id="link2H_4_0035">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I wish you could be making tour of the Regionic capitals with us, Dolly!
+      There are swift little one-rail electric expresses running daily from one
+      capital to another, but these are used only when speed is required, and we
+      are confessedly in no hurry: Aristides wanted me to see as much of the
+      country as possible, and I am as eager as he. The old steam-roads of the
+      capitalistic epoch have been disused for generations, and their beds are
+      now the country roads, which are everywhere kept in beautiful repair.
+      There are no horse vehicles (the electric motors are employed in the
+      towns), though some people travel on horseback, but the favorite means of
+      conveyance is by electric van, which any citizen may have on proof of his
+      need of it; and it is comfortable beyond compare&mdash;mounted on easy
+      springs, and curtained and cushioned like those gypsy vans we see in the
+      country at home. Aristides drives himself, and sometimes we both get out
+      and walk, for there is plenty of time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't know whether I can make you understand how everything has tended
+      to simplification here. They have disused the complicated facilities and
+      conveniences of the capitalistic epoch, which we are so proud of, and have
+      got back as close as possible to nature. People stay at home a great deal
+      more than with us, though if any one likes to make a journey or to visit
+      the capitals he is quite free to do it, and those who have some useful or
+      beautiful object in view make the sacrifice, as they feel it, to leave
+      their villages every day and go to the nearest capital to carry on their
+      studies or experiments. What we consider modern conveniences they would
+      consider a superfluity of naughtiness for the most part. As <i>work</i> is
+      the ideal, they do not believe in what we call labor-saving devices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we approach a village on our journey, one of the villagers, sometimes
+      a young man, and sometimes a girl, comes out to meet us, and when we pass
+      through they send some one with us on the way a little. The people have a
+      perfect inspiration for hospitality: they not only know when to do and how
+      much to do, but how little and when not at all. I can't remember that we
+      have ever once been bored by those nice young things that welcomed us or
+      speeded us on our way, and when we have stopped in a village they have
+      shown a genius for leaving us alone, after the first welcome, that is
+      beautiful. They are so regardful of our privacy, in fact, that if it had
+      not been for Aristides, who explained their ideal to me, I should have
+      felt neglected sometimes, and should have been shy of letting them know
+      that we would like their company. But he understood it, and I must say
+      that I have never enjoyed people and their ways so much. Their hospitality
+      is a sort of compromise between that of the English houses where you are
+      left free at certain houses to follow your own devices absolutely, and
+      that Spanish splendor which assures you that the host's house is yours
+      without meaning it. In fact, the guest-house, wherever we go, <i>is</i>
+      ours, for it belongs to the community, and it is absolutely a home to us
+      for the time being. It is usually the best house in the village, the
+      prettiest and cosiest, where all the houses are so pretty and cosey. There
+      is always another building for public meetings, called the temple, which
+      is the principal edifice, marble and classic and tasteful, which we see
+      almost as much of as the guest-house, for the news of the Emissary's
+      return has preceded him, and everybody is alive with curiosity, and he has
+      to stand and deliver in the village temples everywhere. Of course I am the
+      great attraction, and after being scared by it at first I have rather got
+      to like it; the people are so kind, and unaffected, and really delicate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You mustn't get the notion that the Altrurians are a solemn people at all;
+      they are rather gay, and they like other people's jokes as well as their
+      own; I am sure Mr. Makely, with his sense of humor, would be at home with
+      them at once. The one thing that more than any other has helped them to
+      conceive of the American situation is its being the gigantic joke which we
+      often feel it to be; I don't know but it appears to them more grotesque
+      than it does to us even. At first, when Aristides would explain some
+      peculiarity of ours, they would receive him with a gale of laughing, but
+      this might change into cries of horror and pity later. One of the things
+      that amused and then revolted them most was our patriotism. They thought
+      it the drollest thing in the world that men should be willing to give
+      their own lives and take the lives of other men for the sake of a country
+      which assured them no safety from want, and did not even assure them work,
+      and in which they had no more logical interest than the country they were
+      going to fight. They could understand how a rich man might volunteer for
+      one of our wars, but when they were told that most of our volunteers were
+      poor men, who left their mothers and sisters, or their wives and children,
+      without any means of support, except their meagre pay, they were quite
+      bewildered and stopped laughing, as if the thing had passed a joke. They
+      asked, &ldquo;How if one of these citizen soldiers was killed?&rdquo; and they seemed
+      to suppose that in this case the country would provide for his family and
+      give them work, or if the children were too young would support them at
+      the public expense. It made me creep a little when my husband answered
+      that the family of a crippled or invalided soldier would have a pension of
+      eight or ten or fifteen dollars a month; and when they came back with the
+      question why the citizens of such a country should love it enough to die
+      for it, I could not have said why for the life of me. But Aristides, who
+      is so magnificently generous, tried to give them a notion of the sublimity
+      which is at the bottom of our illogicality and which adjusts so many
+      apparently hopeless points of our anomaly. They asked how this sublimity
+      differed from that of the savage who brings in his game and makes a feast
+      for the whole tribe, and leaves his wife and children without provision
+      against future want; but Aristides told them that there were essential
+      differences between the Americans and savages, which arose from the fact
+      that the savage condition was permanent and the American conditions were
+      unconsciously provisional.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They are quite well informed about our life in some respects, but they
+      wished to hear at first hand whether certain things were really so or not.
+      For instance, they wanted to know whether people were allowed to marry and
+      bring children into the world if they had no hopes of supporting them or
+      educating them, or whether diseased people were allowed to become parents.
+      In Altruria, you know, the families are generally small, only two or three
+      children at the most, so that the parents can devote themselves to them
+      the more fully; and as there is no fear of want here, the state interferes
+      only when the parents are manifestly unfit to bring the little ones up.
+      They imagined that there was something of that kind with us, but when they
+      heard that the state interfered in the family only when the children were
+      unruly, and then it punished the children by sending them to a reform
+      school and disgracing them for life, instead of holding the parents
+      accountable, they seemed to think that it was one of the most anomalous
+      features of our great anomaly. Here, when the father and mother are always
+      quarrelling, the children are taken from them, and the pair are separated,
+      at first for a time, but after several chances for reform they are parted
+      permanently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I must not give you the notion that all our conferences are so
+      serious. Many have merely the character of social entertainments, which
+      are not made here for invited guests, but for any who choose to come; all
+      are welcome. At these there are often plays given by amateurs, and
+      improvised from plots which supply the outline, while the performers
+      supply the dialogue and action, as in the old Italian comedies. The
+      Altrurians are so quick and fine, in fact, that they often remind me of
+      the Italians more than any other people. One night there was for my
+      benefit an American play, as the Altrurians imagined it from what they had
+      read about us, and they had costumed it from the pictures of us they had
+      seen in the newspapers Aristides had sent home while he was with us. The
+      effect was a good deal like that American play which the Japanese company
+      of Sada Yacco gave while it was in New York. It was all about a
+      millionaire's daughter, who was loved by a poor young man and escaped with
+      him to Altruria in an open boat from New York. The millionaire could be
+      distinctly recognized by the dollar-marks which covered him all over, as
+      they do in the caricatures of rich men in our yellow journals. It was
+      funny to the last degree. In the last act he was seen giving his millions
+      away to poor people, whose multitude was represented by the continually
+      coming and going of four or five performers in and out of the door, in
+      outrageously ragged clothes. The Altrurians have not yet imagined the nice
+      degrees of poverty which we have achieved, and they could not have
+      understood that a man with a hundred thousand dollars would have seemed
+      poor to that multi-millionaire. In fact, they do not grasp the idea of
+      money at all. I heard afterwards that in the usual version the millionaire
+      commits suicide in despair, but the piece had been given a happy ending
+      out of kindness to me. I must say that in spite of the monstrous
+      misconception the acting was extremely good, especially that of some comic
+      characters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But dancing is the great national amusement in Altruria, where it has not
+      altogether lost its religious nature. A sort of march in the temples is as
+      much a part of the worship as singing, and so dancing has been preserved
+      from the disgrace which it used to be in with serious people among us. In
+      the lovely afternoons you see young people dancing in the meadows, and
+      hear them shouting in time to the music, while the older men and women
+      watch them from their seats in the shade. Every sort of pleasure here is
+      improvised, and as you pass through a village the first thing you know the
+      young girls and young men start up in a sort of <i>girandole</i>, and
+      linking hands in an endless chain stretch the figure along through the
+      street and out over the highway to the next village, and the next and the
+      next. The work has all been done in the forenoon, and every one who
+      chooses is at liberty to join in the fun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The villages are a good deal alike to a stranger, and we knew what to
+      expect there after a while, but the country is perpetually varied, and the
+      unexpected is always happening in it. The old railroad-beds, on which we
+      travelled, are planted with fruit and nut trees and flowering shrubs, and
+      our progress is through a fragrant bower that is practically endless,
+      except where it takes the shape of a colonnade near the entrance of a
+      village, with vines trained about white pillars, and clusters of grapes
+      (which are ripening just now) hanging down. The change in the climate
+      created by cutting off the southeastern peninsula and letting in the
+      equatorial current, which was begun under the first Altrurian president,
+      with an unexpended war-appropriation, and finished for what one of the old
+      capitalistic wars used to cost, is something perfectly astonishing.
+      Aristides says he told you something about it in his speech at the White
+      Mountains, but you would never believe it without the evidence of your
+      senses. Whole regions to the southward, which were nearest the pole and
+      were sheeted with ice and snow, with the temperature and vegetation of
+      Labrador, now have the climate of Italy; and the mountains, which used to
+      bear nothing but glaciers, are covered with olive orchards and plantations
+      of the delicious coffee which they drink here. Aristides says you could
+      have the same results at home&mdash;no! <i>in the United States</i>&mdash;by
+      cutting off the western shore of Alaska and letting in the Japanese
+      current; and it could be done at the cost of any average war.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0036" id="link2H_4_0036">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      But I must not get away from my personal experiences in these
+      international statistics. Sometimes, when night overtakes us, we stop and
+      camp beside the road, and set about getting our supper of eggs and bread
+      and butter and cheese, or the fruits that are ripening all round us. Since
+      my experience with that pullet I go meekly mushrooming in the fields and
+      pastures; and when I have set the mushrooms stewing over an open fire,
+      Aristides makes the coffee, and in a little while we have a banquet fit
+      for kings&mdash;or for the poor things in every grade below them that
+      serve kings, political or financial or industrial. There is always water,
+      for it is brought down from the snow-fields of the mountains&mdash;there
+      is not much rainfall&mdash;and carried in little concrete channels along
+      the road&mdash;side from village to village, something like those conduits
+      the Italian peasants use to bring down the water from the Maritime Alps to
+      their fields and orchards; and you hear the soft gurgle of it the whole
+      night long, and day long, too, whenever you stop. After supper we can read
+      awhile by our electric lamp (we tap the current in the telephone wires
+      anywhere), or Aristides sacrifices himself to me in a lesson of Altrurian
+      grammar. Then we creep back into our van and fall asleep with the Southern
+      Cross glittering over our heads. It is perfectly safe, though it was a
+      long time before I could imagine the perfect safety of it. In a country
+      where there are no thieves, because a thief here would not know what to do
+      with his booty, we are secure from human molestation, and the land has
+      long been cleared of all sorts of wild beasts, without being unpleasantly
+      tamed. It is like England in that, and yet it has a touch of the sylvan,
+      which you feel nowhere as you do in our dear New England hill country.
+      There was one night, however, when we were lured on and on, and did not
+      stop to camp till fairly in the dusk. Then we went to sleep without
+      supper, for we had had rather a late lunch and were not hungry, and about
+      one o'clock in the morning I was awakened by voices speaking Altrurian
+      together. I recognized my husband's voice, which is always so kind, but
+      which seemed to have a peculiarly tender and compassionate note in it now.
+      The other was lower and of a sadness which wrung my heart, though I did
+      not know in the least what the person was saying. The talk went on a long
+      time, at first about some matter of immediate interest, as I fancied, and
+      then apparently it branched off on some topic which seemed to concern the
+      stranger, whoever he was. Then it seemed to get more indistinct, as if the
+      stranger were leaving us and Aristides were going a little way with him.
+      Presently I heard him coming back, and he put his head in at the van
+      curtains, as if to see whether I was asleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; I said, and he said how sorry he was for having waked me. &ldquo;Oh, I
+      don't mind,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Whom were you talking with? He had the saddest voice
+      I ever heard. What did he want?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, it seems that we are not far from the ruins of one of the old
+      capitalistic cities, which have been left for a sort of warning against
+      the former conditions, and he wished to caution us against the malarial
+      influences from it. I think perhaps we had better push on a little way, if
+      you don't mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The moon was shining clearly, and of course I did not mind, and Aristides
+      got his hand on the lever, and we were soon getting out of the dangerous
+      zone. &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;they ought to abolish that pest-hole. I doubt
+      if it serves any good purpose, now, though it has been useful in times
+      past as an object-lesson.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But who was your unknown friend?&rdquo; I asked, a great deal more curious
+      about him than about the capitalistic ruin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, just a poor murderer,&rdquo; he answered easily, and I shuddered back: &ldquo;A
+      murderer!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. He killed his friend some fifteen years ago in a jealous rage, and
+      he is pursued by remorse that gives him no peace.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And is the remorse his only punishment?&rdquo; I asked, rather indignantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isn't that enough? God seemed to think it was, in the case of the first
+      murderer, who killed his brother. All that he did to Cain was to set a
+      mark on him. But we have not felt sure that we have the right to do this.
+      We let God mark him, and He has done it with this man in the sorrow of his
+      face. I was rather glad you, couldn't see him, my dear. It is an awful
+      face.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I confess that this sounded like mere sentimentalism to me, and I said,
+      &ldquo;Really, Aristides, I can't follow you. How are innocent people to be
+      protected against this wretch, if he wanders about among them at will?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are as safe from him as from any other man in Altruria. His case was
+      carefully looked into by the medical authorities, and it was decided that
+      he was perfectly sane, so that he could be safely left at large, to
+      expiate his misdeed in the only possible way that such a misdeed can be
+      expiated&mdash;by doing good to others. What would you have had us do with
+      him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The question rather staggered me, but I said, &ldquo;He ought to have been
+      imprisoned at least a year for manslaughter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cain was not imprisoned an hour.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was a very different thing. But suppose you let a man go at large
+      who has killed his friend in a jealous rage, what do you do with other
+      murderers?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In Altruria there can be no other murderers. People cannot kill here for
+      money, which prompts every other kind of murder in capitalistic countries,
+      as well as every other kind of crime. I know, my dear, that this seems
+      very strange to you, but you will accustom yourself to the idea, and then
+      you will see the reasonableness of the Altrurian plan. On the whole, I am
+      sorry you could not have seen that hapless man, and heard him. He had a
+      face like death&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And a voice like death, too!&rdquo; I put in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You noticed that? He wanted to talk about his crime with me. He wants to
+      talk about it with any one who will listen to him. He is consumed with an
+      undying pity for the man he slew. That is the first thing, the only thing,
+      in his mind. If he could, I believe he would give his life for the life he
+      took at any moment. But you cannot recreate one life by destroying
+      another. There is no human means of ascertaining justice, but we can
+      always do mercy with divine omniscience.&rdquo; As he spoke the sun pierced the
+      edge of the eastern horizon, and lit up the marble walls and roofs of the
+      Regionic capital which we were approaching.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the meeting we had there in the afternoon, Aristides reported our
+      having been warned against our danger in the night by that murderer, and
+      public record of the fact was made. The Altrurians consider any sort of
+      punishment which is not expiation a far greater sin than the wrong it
+      visits, and altogether barren and useless. After the record in this case
+      had been made, the conference naturally turned upon what Aristides had
+      seen of the treatment of criminals in America, and when, he told of our
+      prisons, where people merely arrested and not yet openly accused are kept,
+      I did not know which way to look, for you know I am still an American at
+      heart, Dolly. Did you ever see the inside of one of our police-stations at
+      night? Or smell it? I did, once, when I went to give bail for a wretched
+      girl who had been my servant, and had gone wrong, but had been arrested
+      for theft, and I assure you that the sight and the smell woke me in the
+      night for a month afterwards, and I have never quite ceased to dream about
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Altrurians listened in silence, and I hoped they could not realize the
+      facts, though the story was every word true; but what seemed to make them
+      the most indignant was the treatment of the families of the prisoners in
+      what we call our penitentiaries and reformatories. At first they did not
+      conceive of it, apparently, because it was so stupidly barbarous; they
+      have no patience with stupidity; and when Aristides had carefully
+      explained, it seemed as if they could not believe it. They thought it
+      right that the convicts should be made to work, but they could not
+      understand that the state really took away their wages, and left their
+      families to suffer for want of the support which it had deprived them of.
+      They said this was punishing the mothers and sisters, the wives and
+      children of the prisoners, and was like putting out the eyes of an
+      offender's innocent relatives as they had read was done in Oriental
+      countries. They asked if there was never any sort of protest against such
+      an atrocious perversion of justice, and when the question was put to me I
+      was obliged to own that I had never heard the system even criticised.
+      Perhaps it has been, but I spoke only from my own knowledge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0037" id="link2H_4_0037">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Well, to get away from these dismal experiences, and come back to our
+      travels, with their perpetual novelty, and the constantly varying beauty
+      of the country!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The human interest of the landscape, that is always the great interest of
+      it, and I wish I could make you feel it as I have felt it in this
+      wonderful journey of ours. It is like the New England landscape at times,
+      in its kind of gentle wildness, but where it has been taken back into the
+      hand of man, how different the human interest is! Instead of a rheumatic
+      old farmer, in his clumsy clothes, with some of his gaunt girls to help
+      him, or perhaps his ageing wife, getting in the hay of one of those sweet
+      meadows, and looking like so many animated scarecrows at their work; or
+      instead of some young farmer, on the seat of his clattering mower, or
+      mounted high over his tedder, but as much alone as if there were no one
+      else in the neighborhood, silent and dull, or fierce or sullen, as the
+      case might be, the work is always going on with companies of mowers or
+      reapers, or planters, that chatter like birds or sing like them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is no use my explaining again and again that in a country like this,
+      where everybody works, nobody over works, and that when the few hours of
+      obligatory labor are passed in the mornings, people need not do anything
+      unless they choose. Their working-dresses are very simple, but in all
+      sorts of gay colors, like those you saw in the Greek play at Harvard, with
+      straw hats for the men, and fillets of ribbon for the girls, and sandals
+      for both. I speak of girls, for most of the married women are at home
+      gardening, or about the household work, but men of every age work in the
+      fields. The earth is dear to them because they get their life from it by
+      labor that is not slavery; they come to love it every acre, every foot,
+      because they have known it from childhood; and I have seen old men, very
+      old, pottering about the orchards and meadows during the hours of
+      voluntary work, and trimming them up here and there, simply because they
+      could not keep away from the place, or keep their hands off the trees and
+      bushes. Sometimes in the long, tender afternoons, we see far up on some
+      pasture slope, groups of girls scattered about on the grass, with their
+      sewing, or listening to some one reading. Other times they are giving a
+      little play, usually a comedy, for life is so happy here that tragedy
+      would not be true to it, with the characters coming and going in a grove
+      of small pines, for the <i>coulisses</i>, and using a level of grass for
+      the stage. If we stop, one of the audience comes down to us and invites us
+      to come up and see the play, which keeps on in spite of the sensation that
+      I can feel I make among them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everywhere the news of us has gone before us, and there is a universal
+      curiosity to get a look at Aristides' capitalistic wife, as they call me.
+      I made him translate it, and he explained that the word was merely
+      descriptive and not characteristic; some people distinguished and called
+      me American. There was one place where they were having a picnic in the
+      woods up a hillside, and they asked us to join them, so we turned our van
+      into the roadside and followed the procession. It was headed by two old
+      men playing on pipes, and after these came children singing, and then all
+      sorts of people, young and old. When we got to an open place in the woods,
+      where there was a spring, and smooth grass, they built fires, and began to
+      get ready for the feast, while some of them did things to amuse the rest.
+      Every one could do something; if you can imagine a party of artists, it
+      was something like that. I should say the Altrurians had artists' manners,
+      free, friendly, and easy, with a dash of humor in everything, and a
+      wonderful willingness to laugh and make laugh. Aristides is always
+      explaining that the artist is their ideal type; that is, some one who
+      works gladly, and plays as gladly as he works; no one here is asked to do
+      work that he hates, unless he seems to hate every kind of work. When this
+      happens, the authorities find out something for him that he had <i>better</i>
+      like, by letting him starve till he works. That picnic lasted the whole
+      afternoon and well into the night, and then the picnickers went home
+      through the starlight, leading the little ones, or carrying them when they
+      were too little or too tired. But first they came down to our van with us,
+      and sang us a serenade after we had disappeared into it, and then left us,
+      and sent their voices back to us out of the dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One morning at dawn, as we came into a village, we saw nearly the whole
+      population mounting the marble steps of the temple, all the holiday dress
+      of the Voluntaries, which they put on here every afternoon when the work
+      is done. Last of the throng came a procession of children, looking
+      something like a May-Day party, and midway of their line were a young man
+      and a young girl, hand in hand, who parted at the door of the temple, and
+      entered separately. Aristides called out, &ldquo;Oh, it is a wedding! You are in
+      luck, Eveleth,&rdquo; and then and there I saw my first Altrurian wedding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within, the pillars and the altar and the seats of the elders were
+      garlanded with flowers, so fresh and fragrant that they seemed to have
+      blossomed from the marble overnight, and there was a soft murmur of
+      Altrurian voices that might very well have seemed the hum of bees among
+      the blossoms. This subsided, as the young couple, who had paused just
+      inside the temple door, came up the middle side by side, and again
+      separated and took their places, the youth on the extreme right of the
+      elder, and the maiden on the extreme left of the eldresses, and stood
+      facing the congregation, which was also on foot, and joined in the hymn
+      which everybody sang. Then one of the eldresses rose and began a sort of
+      statement which Aristides translated to me afterwards. She said that the
+      young couple whom we saw there had for the third time asked to become man
+      and wife, after having believed for a year that they loved each other, and
+      having statedly come before the marriage authorities and been questioned
+      as to the continuance of their affection. She said that probably every one
+      present knew that they had been friends from childhood, and none would be
+      surprised that they now wished to be united for life. They had been
+      carefully instructed as to the serious nature of the marriage bond, and
+      admonished as to the duties they were entering into, not only to each
+      other, but to the community. At each successive visit to the authorities
+      they had been warned, separately and together, against the danger of
+      trusting to anything like a romantic impulse, and they had faithfully
+      endeavored to act upon this advice, as they testified. In order to prove
+      the reality of their affection, they had been parted every third month,
+      and had lived during that time in different Regions where it was meant
+      they should meet many other young people, so that if they felt any
+      swerving of the heart they might not persist in an intention which could
+      only bring them final unhappiness. It seems this is the rule in the case
+      of young lovers, and people usually marry very young here, but if they
+      wish to marry later in life the rule is not enforced so stringently, or
+      not at all. The bride and groom we saw had both stood these trials, and at
+      each return they had been more and more sure that they loved each other,
+      and loved no one else. Now they were here to unite their hands, and to
+      declare the union of their hearts before the people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the eldress sat down and an elder arose, who bade the young people
+      come forward to the centre of the line, where the elders and eldresses
+      were sitting. He took his place behind them, and once more and for the
+      last time he conjured them not to persist if they felt any doubt of
+      themselves. He warned them that if they entered into the married state,
+      and afterwards repented to the point of seeking divorce, the divorce would
+      indeed be granted them, but on terms, as they must realize, of lasting
+      grief to themselves through the offence they would commit against the
+      commonwealth. They answered that they were sure of themselves, and ready
+      to exchange their troth for life and death. Then they joined hands, and
+      declared that they took each other for husband and wife. The congregation
+      broke into another hymn and slowly dispersed, leaving the bride and groom
+      with their families, who came up to them and embraced them, pressing their
+      cheeks against the cheeks of the young pair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This ended the solemnity, and then the festivity began, as it ended, with
+      a wedding feast, where people sang and danced and made speeches and drank
+      toasts, and the fun was kept up till the hours of the Obligatories
+      approached; and then, what do you think? The married pair put off their
+      wedding garments with the rest and went to work in the fields! Later, I
+      understood, if they wished to take a wedding journey they could freely do
+      so; but the first thing in their married life they must honor the
+      Altrurian ideal of work, by which every one must live in order that every
+      other may live without overwork. I believe that the marriage ceremonial is
+      something like that of the Quakers, but I never saw a Quaker wedding, and
+      I could only compare this with the crazy romps with which our
+      house-weddings often end, with throwing of rice and old shoes, and tying
+      ribbons to the bridal carriage and baggage, and following the pair to the
+      train with outbreaks of tiresome hilarity, which make them conspicuous
+      before their fellow-travellers; or with some of our ghastly church
+      weddings, in which the religious ceremonial is lost in the social effect,
+      and ends with that everlasting thumping march from &ldquo;Lohengrin,&rdquo; and the
+      outsiders storming about the bridal pair and the guests with the rude
+      curiosity that the fattest policemen at the canopied and carpeted entrance
+      cannot check.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0038" id="link2H_4_0038">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      We have since been at other weddings and at christenings and at funerals.
+      The ceremonies are always held in the temples, and are always in the same
+      serious spirit. As the Altrurians are steadfast believers in immortality,
+      there is a kind of solemn elevation in the funeral ceremonies which I
+      cannot give you a real notion of. It is helped, I think, by the custom of
+      not performing the ceremony over the dead; a brief rite is reserved for
+      the cemetery, where it is wished that the kindred shall not be present,
+      lest they think always of the material body and not of the spiritual body
+      which shall be raised in incorruption. Religious service is held in the
+      temples every day at the end of the Obligatories, and whenever we are near
+      a village or in any of the capitals we always go. It is very simple. After
+      a hymn, to which the people sometimes march round the interior of the
+      temple, each lays on the altar an offering from the fields or woods where
+      they have been working, if it is nothing but a head of grain or a wild
+      flower or a leaf. Then any one is at liberty to speak, but any one else
+      may go out without offence. There is no ritual; sometimes they read a
+      chapter from the New Testament, preferably a part of the story of Christ
+      or a passage from His discourses. The idea of coming to the temple at the
+      end of the day's labor is to consecrate that day's work, and they do not
+      call anything work that is not work with the hands. When I explained, or
+      tried to explain, that among us a great many people worked with their
+      brains, to amuse others or to get handwork out of them, they were unable
+      to follow me. I asked if they did not consider composing music or poetry
+      or plays, or painting pictures work, and they said, No, that was pleasure,
+      and must be indulged only during the Voluntaries; it was never to be
+      honored like work with the hands, for it would not equalize the burden of
+      that, but might put an undue share of it on others. They said that lives
+      devoted to such pursuits must be very unwholesome, and they brought me to
+      book about the lives of most artists, literary men, and financiers in the
+      capitalistic world to prove what they said. They held that people must
+      work with their hands willingly, in the artistic spirit, but they could
+      only do that when they knew that others differently gifted were working in
+      like manner with their hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I couldn't begin to tell you all our queer experiences. As I have kept
+      saying, I am a great curiosity everywhere, and I could flatter myself that
+      people were more eager to see me than to hear Aristides. Sometimes I
+      couldn't help thinking that they expected to find me an awful warning, a
+      dreadful example of whatever a woman ought not to be, and a woman from
+      capitalistic conditions must be logically. But sometimes they were very
+      intelligent, even the simplest villagers, as we should call them, though
+      there is such an equality of education and opportunity here that no
+      simplicity of life has the effect of dulling people as it has with us. One
+      thing was quite American: they always wanted to know how I liked Altruria,
+      and when I told them, as I sincerely could, that I adored it, they were
+      quite affecting in their pleasure. They generally asked if I would like to
+      go back to America, and when I said No, they were delighted beyond
+      anything. They said I must become a citizen and vote and take part in the
+      government, for that was every woman's duty as well as right; it was wrong
+      to leave the whole responsibility to the men. They asked if American women
+      took no interest in the government, and when I told them there was a very
+      small number who wished to influence politics socially, as the
+      Englishwomen did, but without voting or taking any responsibility, they
+      were shocked. In one of the Regionic capitals they wanted me to speak
+      after Aristides, but I had nothing prepared; at the next I did get off a
+      little speech in English, which he translated after me. Later he put it
+      into Altrurian, and I memorized it, and made myself immensely popular by
+      parroting it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The pronunciation of Altrurian is not difficult, for it is spelled
+      phonetically, and the sounds are very simple. Where they were once
+      difficult they have been simplified, for here the simplification of life
+      extends to everything; and the grammar has been reduced in its structure
+      till it is as elemental as English grammar or Norwegian. The language is
+      Greek in origin, but the intricate inflections and the declensions have
+      been thrown away, and it has kept only the simplest forms. You must get
+      Mr. Twelvemough to explain this to you, Dolly, for it would take me too
+      long, and I have so much else to tell you. A good many of the women have
+      taken up English, but they learn it as a dead language, and they give it a
+      comical effect by trying to pronounce it as it is spelled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose you are anxious, if these letters which are piling up and piling
+      up should ever reach you, or even start to do so, to know something about
+      the Altrurian cities, and what they are like. Well, in the first place,
+      you must cast all images of American cities out of your mind, or any
+      European cities, except, perhaps, the prettiest and stateliest parts of
+      Paris, where there is a regular sky-line, and the public buildings and
+      monuments are approached through shaded avenues. There are no private
+      houses here, in our sense&mdash;that is, houses which people have built
+      with their own money on their own land, and made as ugly outside and as
+      molestive to their neighbors and the passers-by as they chose. As the
+      buildings belong to the whole people, the first requirement is that they
+      shall be beautiful inside and out. There are a few grand edifices looking
+      like Greek temples, which are used for the government offices, and these
+      are, of course, the most dignified, but the dwellings are quite as
+      attractive and comfortable. They are built round courts, with gardens and
+      flowers in the courts, and wide grassy spaces round them. They are rather
+      tall, but never so tall as our great hotels or apartment-houses, and the
+      floors are brought to one level by elevators, which are used only in the
+      capitals; and, generally speaking, I should say the villages were
+      pleasanter than the cities. In fact, the village is the Altrurian ideal,
+      and there is an effort everywhere to reduce the size of the towns and
+      increase the number of the villages. The outlying farms have been gathered
+      into these, and now there is not one of those lonely places in the
+      country, like those where our farmers toil alone outdoors and their wives
+      alone indoors, and both go mad so often in the solitude. The villages are
+      almost in sight of each other, and the people go to their fields in
+      company, while the women carry on their house-keeping co-operatively, with
+      a large kitchen which they use in common; they have their meals apart or
+      together, as they like. If any one is sick or disabled the neighbors come
+      in and help do her work, as they used with us in the early times, and as
+      they still do in country places. Village life here is preferred, just as
+      country life is in England, and one thing that will amuse you, with your
+      American ideas, and your pride in the overgrowth of our cities: the
+      Altrurian papers solemnly announce from time to time that the population
+      of such or such a capital has been reduced so many hundreds or thousands
+      since the last census. That means that the villages in the neighborhood
+      have been increased in number and population.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile, I must say the capitals are delightful: clean, airy, quiet,
+      with the most beautiful architecture, mostly classic and mostly marble,
+      with rivers running through them and round them, and every real
+      convenience, but not a clutter of artificial conveniences, as with us. In
+      the streets there are noiseless trolleys (where they have not been
+      replaced by public automobiles) which the long distances of the ample
+      ground-plan make rather necessary, and the rivers are shot over with swift
+      motor-boats; for the short distances you always expect to walk, or if you
+      don't expect it, you walk anyway. The car-lines and boat-lines are public,
+      and they are free, for the Altrurians think that the community owes
+      transportation to every one who lives beyond easy reach of the points
+      which their work calls them to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course the great government stores are in the capitals, and practically
+      there are no stores in the villages, except for what you might call
+      emergency supplies. But you must not imagine, Dolly, that shopping, here,
+      is like shopping at home&mdash;or in America, as I am learning to say, for
+      Altruria is home now. That is, you don't fill your purse with bank-notes,
+      or have things charged. You get everything you want, within reason, and
+      certainly everything you need, for nothing. You have only to provide
+      yourself with a card, something like that you have to show at the Army and
+      Navy Stores in London, when you first go to buy there, which certifies
+      that you belong to this or that working-phalanx, and that you have not
+      failed in the Obligatories for such and such a length of time. If you are
+      not entitled to this card, you had better not go shopping, for there is no
+      possible equivalent for it which will enable you to carry anything away or
+      have it sent to your house. At first I could not help feeling rather
+      indignant when I was asked to show my work-card in the stores; I had
+      usually forgotten to bring it, or sometimes I had brought my husband's
+      card, which would not do at all, unless I could say that I had been ill or
+      disabled, for a woman is expected to work quite the same as a man. Of
+      course her housework counts, and as we are on a sort of public mission,
+      they count our hours of travel as working-hours, especially as Aristides
+      has made it a point of good citizenship for us to stop every now and then
+      and join in the Obligatories when the villagers were getting in the farm
+      crops or quarrying stone or putting up a house. I am never much use in
+      quarrying or building, but I come in strong in the hay-fields or the apple
+      orchards or the orange groves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shopping here is not so enslaving as it is with us&mdash;I mean, with
+      you&mdash;because the fashions do not change, and you get things only when
+      you need them, not when you want them, or when other people think you do.
+      The costume was fixed long ago, when the Altrurian era began, by a
+      commission of artists, and it would be considered very bad form as well as
+      bad morals to try changing it in the least. People are allowed to choose
+      their own colors, but if one goes very wrong, or so far wrong as to offend
+      the public taste, she is gently admonished by the local art commission. If
+      she insists, they let her have her own way, but she seldom wants it when
+      she knows that people think her a fright. Of course the costume is
+      modified somewhat for the age and shape of the wearer, but this is not so
+      often as you might think. There are no very lean or very stout people,
+      though there are old and young, just as there are with us. But the
+      Altrurians keep young very much longer than capitalistic peoples do, and
+      the life of work keeps down their weight. You know I used to incline a
+      little to over-plumpness, I really believe because I overate at times
+      simply to keep from thinking of the poor who had to undereat, but that is
+      quite past now; I have lost at least twenty-five pounds from working
+      out-doors and travelling so much and living very, very simply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0039" id="link2H_4_0039">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I have to jot things down as they come into my mind, and I am afraid I
+      forget some of the most important. Everybody is so novel on this famous
+      tour of ours that I am continually interested, but one has one's
+      preferences even in Altruria, and I believe I like best the wives of the
+      artists and literary men whom one finds working in the galleries and
+      libraries of the capitals everywhere. They are not more intelligent than
+      other women, perhaps, but they are more sympathetic; and one sees so
+      little of those people in New York, for all they abound there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The galleries are not only for the exhibition of pictures, but each has
+      numbers of ateliers, where the artists work and teach. The libraries are
+      the most wonderfully imagined things. You do not have to come and study in
+      them, but if you are working up any particular subject, the books relating
+      to it are sent to your dwelling every morning and brought away every noon,
+      so that during the obligatory hours you have them completely at your
+      disposition, and during the Voluntaries you can consult them with the rest
+      of the public in the library; it is not thought best that study should be
+      carried on throughout the day, and the results seem to justify this
+      theory. If you want to read a book merely for pleasure, you are allowed to
+      take it out and live with it as long as you like; the copy you have is
+      immediately replaced with another, so that you do not feel hurried and are
+      not obliged to ramp through it in a week or a fortnight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Altrurian books are still rather sealed books to me, but they are
+      delightful to the eye, all in large print on wide margins, with flexible
+      bindings, and such light paper that you can hold them in one hand
+      indefinitely without tiring. I must send you some with this, if I ever get
+      my bundle of letters off to you. You will see by the dates that I am
+      writing you one every day; I had thought of keeping a journal for you, but
+      then I should have had left out a good many things that happened during
+      our first days, when the impressions were so vivid, and I should have got
+      to addressing my records to myself, and I think I had better keep to the
+      form of letters. If they reach you, and you read them at random, why that
+      is very much the way I write them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I despair of giving you any real notion of the capitals, but if you
+      remember the White City at the Columbian Fair at Chicago in 1893, you can
+      have some idea of the general effect of one; only there is nothing
+      heterogeneous in their beauty. There is one classic rule in the
+      architecture, but each of the different architects may characterize an
+      edifice from himself, just as different authors writing the same language
+      characterize it by the diction natural to him. There are suggestions of
+      the capitals in some of our cities, and if you remember Commonwealth
+      Avenue in Boston, you can imagine something like the union of street and
+      garden which every street of them is. The trolleys run under the
+      overarching trees between the lawns, flanked by gravelled footpaths
+      between flower-beds, and you take the cars or not as you like. As there is
+      no hurry, they go about as fast as English trams, and the clanger from
+      them is practically reduced to nothing by the crossings dipping under them
+      at the street corners. The centre of the capital is approached by
+      colonnades, which at night bear groups of great bulbous lamps, and by day
+      flutter with the Altrurian and Regionic flags. Around this centre are the
+      stores and restaurants and theatres, and galleries and libraries, with
+      arcades over the sidewalks, like those in Bologna; sometimes the arcades
+      are in two stories, as they are in Chester. People are constantly coming
+      and going in an easy way during the afternoon, though in the morning the
+      streets are rather deserted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But what is the use? I could go on describing and describing, and never
+      get in half the differences from American cities, with their hideous
+      uproar, and their mud in the wet, and their clouds of swirling dust in the
+      wind. But there is one feature which I must mention, because you can fancy
+      it from the fond dream of a great national highway which some of our
+      architects projected while they were still in the fervor of excitement
+      from the beauty of the Peristyle, and other features of the White City.
+      They really have such a highway here, crossing the whole Altrurian
+      continent, and uniting the circle of the Regionic capitals. As we
+      travelled for a long time by the country roads on the beds of the old
+      railways, I had no idea of this magnificent avenue, till one day my
+      husband suddenly ran our van into the one leading up to the first capital
+      we were to visit. Then I found myself between miles and miles of stately
+      white pillars, rising and sinking as the road found its natural levels,
+      and growing in the perspective before us and dwindling behind us. I could
+      not keep out of my mind a colonnade of palm-trees, only the fronds were
+      lacking, and there were never palms so beautiful. Each pillar was
+      inscribed with the name of some Altrurian who had done something for his
+      country, written some beautiful poem or story, or history, made some
+      scientific discovery, composed an opera, invented a universal convenience,
+      performed a wonderful cure, or been a delightful singer, or orator, or
+      gardener, or farmer. Not one soldier, general or admiral, among them! That
+      seemed very strange to me, and I asked Aristides how it was. Like
+      everything else in Altruria, it was very simple; there had been no war for
+      so long that there were no famous soldiers to commemorate. But he stopped
+      our van when he came to the first of the many arches which spanned the
+      highway, and read out to me in English the Altrurian record that it was
+      erected in honor of the first President of the Altrurian Commonwealth, who
+      managed the negotiations when the capitalistic oligarchies to the north
+      and south were peacefully annexed, and the descendants of the three
+      nations joined in the commemoration of an event that abolished war forever
+      on the Altrurian continent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here I can imagine Mr. Makely asking who footed the bills for this beauty
+      and magnificence, and whether these works were constructed at the cost of
+      the nation, or the different Regions, or the abuttors on the different
+      highways. But the fact is, you poor, capitalistic dears, they cost nobody
+      a dollar, for there is not a dollar in Altruria. You must worry into the
+      idea somehow that in Altruria you cannot buy anything except by working,
+      and that work is the current coin of the republic: you pay for everything
+      by drops of sweat, and off your own brow, not somebody else's brow. The
+      people built these monuments and colonnades, and aqueducts and highways
+      and byways, and sweet villages and palatial cities with their own hands,
+      after the designs of artists, who also took part in the labor. But it was
+      a labor that they delighted in so much that they chose to perform it
+      during the Voluntaries, when they might have been resting, and not during
+      the Obligatories, when they were required to work. So it was all joy and
+      all glory. They say there never was such happiness in any country since
+      the world began. While the work went on it was like a perpetual Fourth of
+      July or an everlasting picnic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I know you hate this sort of economical stuff, Dolly, and I will make
+      haste to get down to business, as Mr. Makely would say, for I am really
+      coming to something that you will think worth while. One morning, when we
+      had made half the circle of the capitals, and were on the homestretch to
+      the one where we had left our dear mother&mdash;for Aristides claims her,
+      too&mdash;and I was letting that dull nether anxiety for her come to the
+      top, though we had had the fullest telephonic talks with her every day,
+      and knew she was well and happy, we came round the shoulder of a wooded
+      cliff and found ourselves on an open stretch of the northern coast. At
+      first I could only exclaim at the beauty of the sea, lying blue and still
+      beyond a long beach closed by another headland, and I did not realize that
+      a large yacht which I saw close to land had gone ashore. The beach was
+      crowded with Altrurians, who seemed to have come to the rescue, for they
+      were putting off to the yacht in boats and returning with passengers, and
+      jumping out, and pulling their boats with them up on to the sand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was quite bewildered, and I don't know what to say I was the next thing,
+      when I saw that the stranded yacht was flying the American flag from her
+      peak. I supposed she must be one of our cruisers, she was so large, and
+      the first thing that flashed into my mind was a kind of amused wonder what
+      those poor Altrurians would do with a ship-of-war and her marines and
+      crew. I couldn't ask any coherent questions, and luckily Aristides was
+      answering my incoherent ones in the best possible way by wheeling our van
+      down on the beach and making for the point nearest the yacht. He had time
+      to say he did not believe she was a government vessel, and, in fact, I
+      remembered that once I had seen a boat in the North River getting up steam
+      to go to Europe which was much larger, and had her decks covered with
+      sailors that I took for bluejackets; but she was only the private yacht of
+      some people I knew. These stupid things kept going and coming in my mind
+      while my husband was talking with some of the Altrurian girls who were
+      there helping with the men. They said that the yacht had gone ashore the
+      night before last in one of the sudden fogs that come up on that coast,
+      and that some people whom the sailors seemed to obey were camping on the
+      edge of the upland above the beach, under a large tent they had brought
+      from the yacht. They had refused to go to the guest-house in the nearest
+      village, and as nearly as the girls could make out they expected the yacht
+      to get afloat from tide to tide, and then intended to re-embark on her. In
+      the mean time they had provisioned themselves from the ship, and were
+      living in a strange way of their own. Some of them seemed to serve the
+      others, but these appeared to be used with a very ungrateful indifference,
+      as if they were of a different race. There was one who wore a white apron
+      and white cap who directed the cooking for the rest, and had several
+      assistants; and from time to time very disagreeable odors came from the
+      camp, like burning flesh. The Altrurians had carried them fruits and
+      vegetables, but the men-assistants had refused them contemptuously and
+      seemed suspicious of the variety of mushrooms they offered them. They
+      called out, &ldquo;To-stoo!&rdquo; and I understood that the strangers were afraid
+      they were bringing toad-stools. One of the Altrurian girls had been
+      studying English in the nearest capital, and she had tried to talk with
+      these people, pronouncing it in the Altrurian way, but they could make
+      nothing of one another; then she wrote down what she wanted to say, but as
+      she spelled it phonetically they were not able to read her English. She
+      asked us if I was the American Altrurian she had heard of, and when I said
+      yes she lost no time in showing us to the camp of the castaways.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As soon as we saw their tents we went forward till we were met at the
+      largest by a sort of marine footman, who bowed slightly and said to me,
+      &ldquo;What name shall I say, ma'am?&rdquo; and I answered distinctly, so that he
+      might get the name right, &ldquo;Mr. and Mrs. Homos.&rdquo; Then he held back the flap
+      of the marquee, which seemed to serve these people as a drawing-room, and
+      called out, standing very rigidly upright, to let us pass, in the way that
+      I remembered so well, &ldquo;Mr. And Mrs. 'Omos!&rdquo; and a severe-looking, rather
+      elderly lady rose to meet us with an air that was both anxious and
+      forbidding, and before she said anything else she burst out, &ldquo;You don't
+      mean to say you speak English?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I said that I spoke English, and had not spoken anything else but rather
+      poor French until six months before, and then she demanded, &ldquo;Have you been
+      cast away on this outlandish place, too?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I laughed and said I lived here, and I introduced my husband as well as I
+      could without knowing her name. He explained with his pretty Altrurian
+      accent, which you used to like so much, that we had ventured to come in
+      the hope of being of use to them, and added some regrets for their
+      misfortune so sweetly that I wondered she could help responding in kind.
+      But she merely said, &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; and then she seemed to recollect herself, and
+      frowning to a very gentle-looking old man to come forward, she ignored my
+      husband in presenting me. &ldquo;Mr. Thrall, Mrs. &mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She hesitated for my name, and I supplied it, &ldquo;Homos,&rdquo; and as the old man
+      had put out his hand in a kindly way I took it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And this is my husband, Aristides Homos, an Altrurian,&rdquo; I said, and then,
+      as the lady had not asked us to sit down, or shown the least sign of
+      liking our being there, the natural woman flamed up in me as she hadn't in
+      all the time I have been away from New York. &ldquo;I am glad you are so
+      comfortable here, Mr. Thrall. You won't need us, I see. The people about
+      will do anything in their power for you. Come, my dear,&rdquo; and I was
+      sweeping out of that tent in a manner calculated to give the eminent
+      millionaire's wife a notion of Altrurian hauteur which I must own would
+      have been altogether mistaken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I knew who they were perfectly. Even if I had not once met them I should
+      have known that they were the ultra-rich Thralls, from the multitudinous
+      pictures of them that I had seen in the papers at home, not long after
+      they came on to New York.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was beginning, &ldquo;Oh no, oh no,&rdquo; but I cut in. &ldquo;My husband and I are on
+      our way to the next Regionic capital, and we are somewhat hurried. You
+      will be quite well looked after by the neighbors here, and I see that we
+      are rather in your housekeeper's way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It <i>was</i> nasty, Dolly, and I won't deny it; it was <i>vulgar</i>. But
+      what would <i>you</i> have done? I could feel Aristides' mild eye sadly on
+      me, and I was sorry for him, but I assure him I was not sorry for them,
+      till that old man spoke again, so timidly: &ldquo;It isn't my&mdash;it's my
+      wife, Mrs. Homos. Let me introduce her. But haven't we met before?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps during my first husband's lifetime. I was Mrs. Bellington
+      Strange.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. P. Bellington Strange? Your husband was a dear friend of mine when
+      we were both young&mdash;a good man, if ever there was one; the best in
+      the world! I am so glad to see you again. Ah&mdash;my dear, you remember
+      my speaking of Mrs. Strange?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took my hand again and held it in his soft old hands, as if hesitating
+      whether to transfer it to her, and my heart melted towards him. You may
+      think it very odd, Dolly, but it was what he said of my dear, dead husband
+      that softened me. It made him seem very fatherly, and I felt the affection
+      for him that I felt for my husband, when he seemed more like a father.
+      Aristides and I often talk of it, and he has no wish that I should forget
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Thrall made no motion to take my hand from him, but she said, &ldquo;I
+      think I have met Mr. Strange,&rdquo; and now I saw in the background, sitting on
+      a camp-stool near a long, lank young man stretched in a hammock, a very
+      handsome girl, who hastily ran through a book, and then dropped it at the
+      third mention of my name. I suspected that the book was the Social
+      Register, and that the girl's search for me had been satisfactory, for she
+      rose and came vaguely towards us, while the young man unfolded himself
+      from the hammock, and stood hesitating, but looking as if he rather liked
+      what had happened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Thrall bustled about for camp-stools, and said, &ldquo;Do stop and have some
+      breakfast with us, it's just coming in. May I introduce my daughter, Lady
+      Moors and&mdash;and Lord Moors?&rdquo; The girl took my hand, and the young man
+      bowed from his place; but if that poor old man had known, peace was not to
+      be made so easily between two such bad-tempered women as Mrs. Thrall and
+      myself. We expressed some very stiff sentiments in regard to the weather,
+      and the prospect of the yacht getting off with the next tide, and my
+      husband joined in with that manly gentleness of his, but we did not sit
+      down, much less offer to stay to breakfast. We had got to the door of the
+      tent, the family following us, even to the noble son-in-law, and as she
+      now realized that we are actually going, Mrs. Thrall gasped out, &ldquo;But you
+      are not <i>leaving</i> us? What shall we <i>do</i> with all these
+      natives?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was again too much, and I flamed out at her. &ldquo;<i>Natives</i>! They
+      are cultivated and refined people, for they are Altrurians, and I assure
+      you you will be in much better hands than mine with them, for I am only
+      Altrurian by marriage!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was one of those leathery egotists that nothing will make a dint in,
+      and she came back with, &ldquo;But we don't speak the language, and they don't
+      speak English, and how are we to manage if the yacht doesn't get afloat?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no doubt you will be looked after from the capital we have just left.
+      But I will venture to make a little suggestion with regard to the natives
+      in the mean time. They are not proud, but they are very sensitive, and if
+      you fail in any point of consideration, they will understand that you do
+      not want their hospitality.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I imagine our own people will be able to look after us,&rdquo; she answered
+      quite as nastily. &ldquo;We do not propose to be dependent on them. We can pay
+      our way here as we do elsewhere.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The experiment will be worth trying,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Come, Aristides!&rdquo; and I
+      took the poor fellow away with me to our van. Mr. Thrall made some
+      hopeless little movements towards us, but I would not stop or even look
+      back. When we got into the van, I made Aristides put on the full power,
+      and fell back into my seat and cried a while, and then I scolded him
+      because he would not scold me, and went on in a really scandalous way. It
+      must have been a revelation to him, but he only smoothed me on the
+      shoulder and said, &ldquo;Poor Eveleth, poor Eveleth,&rdquo; till I thought I should
+      scream; but it ended in my falling on his neck, and saying I knew I was
+      horrid, and what did he want me to do?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After I calmed down into something like rationality, he said he thought we
+      had perhaps done the best thing we could for those people in leaving them
+      to themselves, for they could come to no possible harm among the
+      neighbors. He did not believe from what he had seen of the yacht from the
+      shore, and from what the Altrurians had told him, that there was one
+      chance in a thousand of her ever getting afloat. But those people would
+      have to convince themselves of the fact, and of several other facts in
+      their situation. I asked him what he meant, and he said he could tell me,
+      but that as yet it was a public affair, and he would rather not anticipate
+      the private interest I would feel in it. I did not insist; in fact, I
+      wanted to get that odious woman out of my mind as soon as I could, for the
+      thought of her threatened to poison the pleasure of the rest of our tour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I believe my husband hurried it a little, though he did not shorten it,
+      and we got back to the Maritime Region almost a week sooner than we had
+      first intended. I found my dear mother well, and still serenely happy in
+      her Altrurian surroundings. She had begun to learn the language, and she
+      had a larger acquaintance in the capital, I believe, than any other one
+      person. She said everybody had called on her, and they were the kindest
+      people she had ever dreamed of. She had exchanged cooking-lessons with one
+      lady who, they told her, was a distinguished scientist, and she had taught
+      another, who was a great painter, a peculiar embroidery stitch which she
+      had learned from my grandmother, and which everybody admired. These two
+      ladies had given her most of her grammatical instruction in Altrurian, but
+      there was a bright little girl who had enlarged her vocabulary more than
+      either, in helping her about her housework, the mother having lent her for
+      the purpose. My mother said she was not ashamed to make blunders before a
+      child, and the little witch had taken the greatest delight in telling her
+      the names of things in the house and the streets and the fields outside
+      the town, where they went long walks together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0040" id="link2H_4_0040">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      X
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Well, my dear Dorothea, I had been hoping to go more into detail about my
+      mother and about our life in the Maritime Capital, which is to be our home
+      for a year, but I had hardly got down the last words when Aristides came
+      in with a despatch from the Seventh Regionic, summoning us there on
+      important public business: I haven't got over the feeling yet of being
+      especially distinguished and flattered at sharing in public business; but
+      the Altrurian women are so used to it that they do not think anything of
+      it. The despatch was signed by an old friend of my husband's, Cyril
+      Chrysostom, who had once been Emissary in England, and to whom my husband
+      wrote his letters when he was in America. I hated to leave my mother so
+      soon, but it could not be helped, and we took the first electric express
+      for the Seventh Regionic, where we arrived in about an hour and forty
+      minutes, making the three hundred miles in that time easily. I couldn't
+      help regretting our comfortable van, but there was evidently haste in the
+      summons, and I confess that I was curious to know what the matter was,
+      though I had made a shrewd guess the first instant, and it turned out that
+      I was not mistaken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The long and the short of it was that there was trouble with the people
+      who had come ashore in that yacht, and were destined never to go to sea in
+      her. She was hopelessly bedded in the sand, and the waves that were
+      breaking over her were burying her deeper and deeper. The owners were
+      living in their tent as we had left them, and her crew were camped in
+      smaller tents and any shelter they could get, along the beach. They had
+      brought her stores away, but many of the provisions had been damaged, and
+      it had become a pressing question what should be done about the people. We
+      had been asked to consult with Cyril and his wife, and the other Regionic
+      chiefs and their wives, and we threshed the question out nearly the whole
+      night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am afraid it will appear rather comical in some aspects to you and Mr.
+      Makely, but I can assure you that it was a very serious matter with the
+      Altrurian authorities. If there had been any hope of a vessel from the
+      capitalistic world touching at Altruria within a definite time, they could
+      have managed, for they would have gladly kept the yacht's people and
+      owners till they could embark them for Australia or New Zealand, and would
+      have made as little of the trouble they were giving as they could. But
+      until the trader that brought us should return with the crew, as the
+      captain had promised, there was no ship expected, and any other wreck in
+      the mean time would only add to their difficulty. You may be surprised,
+      though I was not, that the difficulty was mostly with the yacht-owners,
+      and above all with Mrs. Thrall, who had baffled every effort of the
+      authorities to reduce what they considered the disorder of their life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the crew it was a different matter. As soon as they had got drunk on
+      the wines and spirits they had brought from the wreck, and then had got
+      sober because they had drunk all the liquors up, they began to be more
+      manageable; when their provisions ran short, and they were made to
+      understand that they would not be allowed to plunder the fields and woods,
+      or loot the villages for something to eat, they became almost exemplarily
+      docile. At first they were disposed to show fight, and the principles of
+      the Altrurians did not allow them to use violence in bringing them to
+      subjection; but the men had counted without their hosts in supposing that
+      they could therefore do as they pleased, unless they pleased to do right.
+      After they had made their first foray they were warned by Cyril, who came
+      from the capital to speak English with them, that another raid would not
+      be suffered. They therefore attempted it by night, but the Altrurians were
+      prepared for them with the flexible steel nets which are their only means
+      of defence, and half a dozen sailors were taken in one. When they
+      attempted to break out, and their shipmates attempted to break in to free
+      them, a light current of electricity was sent through the wires and the
+      thing was done. Those who were rescued&mdash;the Altrurians will not say
+      captured&mdash;had hoes put into their hands the next morning, and were
+      led into the fields and set to work, after a generous breakfast of coffee,
+      bread, and mushrooms. The chickens they had killed in their midnight
+      expedition were buried, and those which they had not killed lost no time
+      in beginning to lay eggs for the sustenance of the reformed castaways. As
+      an extra precaution with the &ldquo;rescued,&rdquo; when they were put to work, each
+      of them with a kind of shirt of mail, worn over his coat, which could
+      easily be electrized by a metallic filament connecting with the communal
+      dynamo, and under these conditions they each did a full day's work during
+      the Obligatories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the short commons grew shorter and shorter, both meat and drink, at
+      Camp Famine, and the campers found it was useless to attempt thieving from
+      the Altrurians, they had tried begging from the owners in their large
+      tent, but they were told that the provisions were giving out there, too,
+      and there was nothing for them. When they insisted the servants of the
+      owners had threatened them with revolvers, and the sailors, who had
+      nothing but their knives, preferred to attempt living on the country.
+      Within a week the whole crew had been put to work in the woods and fields
+      and quarries, or wherever they could make themselves useful. They were, on
+      the whole, so well fed and sheltered that they were perfectly satisfied,
+      and went down with the Altrurians on the beach during the Voluntaries and
+      helped secure the yacht's boats and pieces of wreckage that came ashore.
+      Until they became accustomed or resigned to the Altrurian diet, they were
+      allowed to catch shell-fish and the crabs that swarmed along the sand and
+      cook them, but on condition that they built their fires on the beach, and
+      cooked only during an offshore wind, so that the fumes of the roasting
+      should not offend the villagers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cyril acknowledged, therefore, that the question of the crew was for the
+      present practically settled, but Mr. and Mrs. Thrall, and their daughter
+      and son-in-law, with their servants, still presented a formidable problem.
+      As yet, their provisions had not run out, and they were living in their
+      marquee as we had seen them three weeks earlier, just after their yacht
+      went ashore. It could not be said that they were molestive in the same
+      sense as the sailors, but they were even more demoralizing in the
+      spectacle they offered the neighborhood of people dependent on hired
+      service, and in their endeavors to supply themselves in perishable
+      provisions, like milk and eggs, by means of money. Cyril had held several
+      interviews with them, in which he had at first delicately intimated, and
+      then explicitly declared, that the situation could not be prolonged. The
+      two men had been able to get the Altrurian point of view in some measure,
+      and so had Lady Moors, but Mrs. Thrall had remained stiffly obtuse and
+      obstinate, and it was in despair of bringing her to terms without
+      resorting to rescue that he had summoned us to help him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not a pleasant job, but of course we could not refuse, and we
+      agreed that as soon as we had caught a nap, and had a bite of breakfast we
+      would go over to their camp with Cyril and his wife, and see what we could
+      do with the obnoxious woman. I confess that I had some little consolation
+      in the hope that I should see her properly humbled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0041" id="link2H_4_0041">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Thrall and Lord Moors must have seen us coming, for they met us at the
+      door of the tent without the intervention of the footman, and gave us
+      quite as much welcome as we could expect in our mission, so disagreeable
+      all round. Mr. Thrall was as fatherly with me as before, and Lord Moors
+      was as polite to Cyril and Mrs. Chrysostom as could have been wished. In
+      fact he and Cyril were a sort of acquaintances from the time of Cyril's
+      visit to England where he met the late Earl Moors, the father of the
+      present peer, in some of his visits to Toynbee Hall, and the Whitechapel
+      Settlements. The earl was very much interested in the slums, perhaps
+      because he was rather poor himself, if not quite slummy. The son was then
+      at the university, and when he came out and into his title he so far
+      shared his father's tastes that he came to America; it was not slumming,
+      exactly, but a nobleman no doubt feels it to be something like it. After a
+      little while in New York he went out to Colorado, where so many needy
+      noblemen bring up, and there he met the Thralls, and fell in love with the
+      girl. Cyril had understood&mdash;or rather Mrs. Cyril,&mdash;that it was a
+      love-match on both sides, but on Mrs. Thrall's side it was business. He
+      did not even speak of settlements&mdash;the English are so romantic when
+      they <i>are</i> romantic!&mdash;but Mr. Thrall saw to all that, and the
+      young people were married after a very short courtship. They spent their
+      honeymoon partly in Colorado Springs and partly in San Francisco, where
+      the Thralls' yacht was lying, and then they set out on a voyage round the
+      world, making stops at the interesting places, and bringing up on the
+      beach of the Seventh Region of Altruria, on route for the eastern coast of
+      South America. From that time on, Cyril said, we knew their history.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After Mr. Thrall had shaken hands tenderly with me, and cordially with
+      Aristides, he said, &ldquo;Won't you all come inside and have breakfast with us?
+      My wife and daughter&rdquo;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you, Mr. Thrall,&rdquo; Cyril answered for us, &ldquo;we will sit down here, if
+      you please; and as your ladies are not used to business, we will not ask
+      you to disturb them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sure Lady Moors,&rdquo; the young nobleman began, but Cyril waved him
+      silent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We shall be glad later, but not now! Gentlemen, I have asked my friends
+      Aristides Homos and Eveleth Homos to accompany my wife and me this morning
+      because Eveleth is an American, and will understand your position, and he
+      has lately been in America and will be able to clarify the situation from
+      both sides. We wish you to believe that we are approaching you in the
+      friendliest spirit, and that nothing could be more painful to us than to
+      seem inhospitable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then why,&rdquo; the old man asked, with business-like promptness, &ldquo;do you
+      object to our presence here? I don't believe I get your idea.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because the spectacle which your life offers is contrary to good morals,
+      and as faithful citizens we cannot countenance it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But in what way is our life immoral? I have always thought that I was a
+      good citizen at home; at least I can't remember having been arrested for
+      disorderly conduct.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled at me, as if I should appreciate the joke, and it hurt me to
+      keep grave, but suspecting what a bad time he was going to have, I thought
+      I had better not join him in any levity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I quite conceive you,&rdquo; Cyril replied. &ldquo;But you present to our people, who
+      are offended by it, the spectacle of dependence upon hireling service for
+      your daily comfort and convenience.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, my dear sir,&rdquo; Mr. Thrall returned, &ldquo;don't we <i>pay</i> for it? Do
+      our servants object to rendering us this service?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That has nothing to do with the case; or, rather, it makes it worse. The
+      fact that your servants do not object shows how completely they are
+      depraved by usage. We should not object if they served you from affection,
+      and if you repaid them in kindness; but the fact that you think you have
+      made them a due return by giving them money shows how far from the right
+      ideal in such a matter the whole capitalistic world is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, to my great delight, Aristides spoke up:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If the American practice were half as depraving as it ought logically to
+      be in their conditions, their social system would drop to pieces. It was
+      always astonishing to me that a people with their facilities for evil,
+      their difficulties for good, should remain so kind and just and pure.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is what I understood from your letters to me, my dear Aristides. I
+      am willing to leave the general argument for the present. But I should
+      like to ask Mr. Thrall a question, and I hope it won't be offensive.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Thrall smiled. &ldquo;At any rate I promise not to be offended.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a very rich man?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Much richer than I would like to be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How rich?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Seventy millions; eighty; a hundred; three hundred; I don't just know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't suppose you've always felt your great wealth a great blessing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A blessing? There have been times when I felt it a millstone hanged about
+      my neck, and could have wished nothing so much as that I were thrown into
+      the sea. Man, you don't <i>know</i> what a curse I have felt my money to
+      be at such times. When I have given it away, as I have by millions at a
+      time, I have never been sure that I was not doing more harm than good with
+      it. I have hired men to seek out good objects for me, and I have tried my
+      best to find for myself causes and institutions and persons who might be
+      helped without hindering others as worthy, but sometimes it seems as if
+      every dollar of my money carried a blight with it, and infected whoever
+      touched it with a moral pestilence. It has reached a sum where the wildest
+      profligate couldn't spend it, and it grows and grows. It's as if it were a
+      rising flood that had touched my lips, and would go over my head before I
+      could reach the shore. I believe I got it honestly, and I have tried to
+      share it with those whose labor earned it for me. I have founded schools
+      and hospitals and homes for old men and old women, and asylums for
+      children, and the blind, and deaf, and dumb, and halt, and mad. Wherever I
+      have found one of my old workmen in need, and I have looked personally
+      into the matter, I have provided for him fully, short of pauperization.
+      Where I have heard of some gifted youth, I have had him educated in the
+      line of his gift. I have collected a gallery of works of art, and opened
+      it on Sundays as well as week-days to the public free. If there is a story
+      of famine, far or near, I send food by the shipload. If there is any great
+      public calamity, my agents have instructions to come to the rescue without
+      referring the case to me. But it is all useless! The money grows and
+      grows, and I begin to feel that my efforts to employ it wisely and
+      wholesomely are making me a public laughing-stock as well as an easy mark
+      for every swindler with a job or a scheme.&rdquo; He turned abruptly to me. &ldquo;But
+      you must often have heard the same from my old friend Strange. We used to
+      talk these things over together, when our money was not the heap that mine
+      is now; and it seems to me I can hear his voice saying the very words I
+      have been using.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I, too, seemed to hear his voice in the words, and it was as if speaking
+      from his grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked at Aristides, and read compassion in his dear face; but the face
+      of Cyril remained severe and judicial. He said: &ldquo;Then, if what you say is
+      true, you cannot think it a hardship if we remove your burden for the time
+      you remain with us. I have consulted with the National and Regional as
+      well as the Communal authorities, and we cannot let you continue to live
+      in the manner you are living here. You must pay your way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall be only too glad to do that,&rdquo; Mr. Thrall returned, more
+      cheerfully. &ldquo;We have not a great deal of cash in hand, but I can give you
+      my check on London or Paris or New York.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In Altruria,&rdquo; Cyril returned, &ldquo;we have no use for money. You must <i>pay</i>
+      your way as soon as your present provision from your yacht is exhausted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Thrall turned a dazed look on the young lord, who suggested: &ldquo;I don't
+      think we follow you. How can Mr. Thrall pay his way except with money?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He must pay with <i>work</i>. As soon as you come upon the neighbors here
+      for the necessities of life you must all work. To-morrow or the next day
+      or next week at the furthest you must go to work, or you must starve.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he came out with that text of Scripture which had been so efficient
+      with the crew of the <i>Little Sally</i>: &ldquo;For even when we were with you
+      this we commanded you, that if any would not work neither should he eat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Moors seemed very interested, and not so much surprised as I had
+      expected. &ldquo;Yes, I have often thought of that passage and of its
+      susceptibility to a simpler interpretation than we usually give it. But&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is but one interpretation of which it is susceptible,&rdquo; Cyril
+      interrupted. &ldquo;The apostle gives that interpretation when he prefaces the
+      text with the words, 'For yourselves know how you ought to follow us; for
+      we behaved not ourselves disorderly among you. Neither did we eat any
+      man's bread for nought; but <i>wrought with travail</i> night and day,
+      that we might not be chargeable to any of you: not because we have not
+      power, but to make ourselves an ensample unto you to follow us.' The whole
+      economy of Altruria is founded on these passages.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Literally?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Literally.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, my dear sir,&rdquo; the young lord reasoned, &ldquo;you surely do not wrench the
+      text from some such meaning as that if a man has money, he may pay his way
+      without working?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, certainly not. But here you have no money, and as we cannot suffer
+      any to 'walk among us disorderly, working not at all,' we must not exempt
+      you from our rule.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0042" id="link2H_4_0042">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      At this point there came a sound from within the marquee as of skirts
+      sweeping forward sharply, imperiously, followed by a softer <i>frou-frou</i>,
+      and Mrs. Thrall put aside the curtain of the tent with one hand, and stood
+      challenging our little Altrurian group, while Lady Moors peered timidly at
+      us from over her mother's shoulder. I felt a lust of battle rising in me
+      at sight of that woman, and it was as much as I could do to control
+      myself; but in view of the bad time I knew she was going to have, I
+      managed to hold in, though I joined very scantly in the polite greetings
+      of the Chrysostoms and Aristides, which she ignored as if they had been
+      the salutations of savages. She glared at her husband for explanation, and
+      he said, gently, &ldquo;This is a delegation from the Altrurian capital, my
+      dear, and we have been talking over the situation together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what is this,&rdquo; she demanded, &ldquo;that I have heard about our not paying?
+      Do they accuse us of not paying? You could buy and sell the whole
+      country.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I never imagined so much mildness could be put into such offensive words
+      as Cyril managed to get into his answer. &ldquo;We accuse you of not paying, and
+      we do not mean that you shall become chargeable to us. The men and women
+      who served you on shipboard have been put to work, and you must go to
+      work, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Thrall&mdash;Lord Moors&mdash;have you allowed these people to treat
+      you as if you were part of the ship's crew? Why don't you give them what
+      they want and let them go? Of course it's some sort of blackmailing
+      scheme. But you ought to get rid of them at any cost. Then you can appeal
+      to the authorities, and tell them that you will bring the matter to the
+      notice of the government at Washington. They must be taught that they
+      cannot insult American citizens with impunity.&rdquo; No one spoke, and she
+      added, &ldquo;What do they really want?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, my dear,&rdquo; her husband hesitated, &ldquo;I hardly know how to explain. But
+      it seems that they think our living here in the way we do is orderly, and&mdash;and
+      they want us to go to work, in short.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To <i>work!</i>&rdquo; she shouted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, all of us. That is, so I understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What nonsense!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at us one after another, and when her eye rested on me, I began
+      to suspect that insolent as she was she was even duller; in fact, that she
+      was so sodden in her conceit of wealth that she was plain stupid. So when
+      she said to me, &ldquo;You are an American by birth, I believe. Can you tell me
+      the meaning of this?&rdquo; I answered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cyril Chrysostom represents the authorities. If <i>he</i> asks me to
+      speak, I will speak.&rdquo; Cyril nodded at me with a smile, and I went on. &ldquo;It
+      is a very simple matter. In Altruria everybody works with his hands three
+      hours a day. After that he works or not, as he likes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have we to do with that?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The rule has no exceptions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But we are not Altrurians; we are Americans.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am an American, too, and I work three hours every day, unless I am
+      passing from one point to another on public business with my husband. Even
+      then we prefer to stop during the work-hours, and help in the fields, or
+      in the shops, or wherever we are needed. I left my own mother at home
+      doing her kitchen work yesterday afternoon, though it was out of hours,
+      and she need not have worked.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well, then, we will do nothing of the kind, neither I, nor my
+      daughter, nor my husband. He has worked hard all his life, and he has come
+      away for a much-needed rest. I am not going to have him breaking himself
+      down.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I could not help suggesting, &ldquo;I suppose the men at work in his mines, and
+      mills, and on his railroads and steamship lines are taking a much-needed
+      rest, too. I hope you are not going to let them break themselves down,
+      either.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Aristides gave me a pained glance, and Cyril and his wife looked grave,
+      but she not quite so grave as he. Lord Moors said, &ldquo;We don't seem to be
+      getting on. What Mrs. Thrall fails to see, and I confess I don't quite see
+      it myself, is that if we are not here <i>in forma pauperis</i>&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you <i>are</i> here <i>in forma pauperis</i>,&rdquo; Cyril interposed,
+      smilingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How is that? If we are willing to pay&mdash;if Mr. Thrall's credit is
+      undeniably good&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Thrall's credit is not good in Altruria; you can pay here only in one
+      currency, in the sweat of your faces.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You want us to be Tolstoys, I suppose,&rdquo; Mrs. Thrall said, contemptuously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cyril replied, gently, &ldquo;The endeavor of Tolstoy, in capitalistic
+      conditions, is necessarily dramatic. Your labor here will be for your
+      daily bread, and it will be real.&rdquo; The inner dullness of the woman came
+      into her eyes again, and he addressed himself to Lord Moors in continuing:
+      &ldquo;If a company of indigent people were cast away on an English coast, after
+      you had rendered them the first aid, what should you do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man reflected. &ldquo;I suppose we should put them in the way of
+      earning a living until some ship arrived to take them home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is merely what we propose to do in your case here,&rdquo; Cyril said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But we are not indigent&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you are absolutely destitute. You have money and credit, but neither
+      has any value in Altruria. Nothing but work or love has any value in
+      Altruria. You cannot realize too clearly that you stand before us <i>in
+      forma pauperis</i>. But we require of you nothing that we do not require
+      of ourselves. In Altruria every one is poor till he pays with work; then,
+      for that time, he is rich; and he cannot otherwise lift himself above
+      charity, which, except in the case of the helpless, we consider immoral.
+      Your life here offers a very corrupting spectacle. You are manifestly
+      living without work, and you are served by people whose hire you are not
+      able to pay.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear sir,&rdquo; Mr. Thrall said at this point, with a gentle smile, &ldquo;I
+      think they are willing to take the chances of being paid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We cannot suffer them to do so. At present we know of no means of your
+      getting away from Altruria. We have disused our custom of annually
+      connecting with the Australasian steamers, and it may be years before a
+      vessel touches on our coast. A ship sailed for Boston some months ago,
+      with the promise of returning in order that the crew may cast in their lot
+      with us permanently. We do not confide in that promise, and you must
+      therefore conform to our rule of life. Understand clearly that the
+      willingness of your servants to serve you has nothing to do with the
+      matter. That is part of the falsity in which the whole capitalistic world
+      lives. As the matter stands with you, here, there is as much reason why
+      you should serve them as they should serve you. If on their side they
+      should elect to serve you from love, they will be allowed to do so.
+      Otherwise, you and they must go to work with the neighbors at the tasks
+      they will assign you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean at once?&rdquo; Lord Moors asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The hours of the obligatory labors are nearly past for the day. But if
+      you are interested in learning what you will be set to doing to-morrow,
+      the Communal authorities will be pleased to instruct you during the
+      Voluntaries this afternoon. You may be sure that in no case will your
+      weakness or inexperience be overtasked. Your histories will be studied,
+      and appropriate work will be assigned to each of you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Thrall burst out, &ldquo;If you think I am going into my kitchen&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I burst in, &ldquo;I left my mother in <i>her</i> kitchen!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And a very fit place for her, I dare say,&rdquo; she retorted, but Lady Moors
+      caught her mother's arm and murmured, in much the same distress as showed
+      in my husband's mild eyes, &ldquo;Mother! Mother!&rdquo; and drew her within.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0043" id="link2H_4_0043">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Well, Dolly, I suppose you will think it was pretty hard for those people,
+      and when I got over my temper I confess that I felt sorry for the two men,
+      and for the young girl whom the Altrurians would not call Lady Moors, but
+      addressed by her Christian name, as they did each of the American party in
+      his or her turn; even Mrs. Thrall had to answer to Rebecca. They were all
+      rather bewildered, and so were the butler and the footmen, and the <i>chef</i>
+      and his helpers, and the ladies' maids. These were even more shocked than
+      those they considered their betters, and I quite took to my affections
+      Lord Moors' man Robert, who was in an awe-stricken way trying to get some
+      light from me on the situation. He contributed as much as any one to bring
+      about a peaceful submission to the inevitable, for he had been a near
+      witness of what had happened to the crew when they attempted their
+      rebellion to the authorities; but he did not profess to understand the
+      matter, and from time to time he seemed to question the reality of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two masters, as you would call Mr. Thrall and Lord Moors, both took an
+      attitude of amiable curiosity towards their fate, and accepted it with
+      interest when they had partly chosen and partly been chosen by it. Mr.
+      Thrall had been brought up on a farm till his ambition carried him into
+      the world; and he found the light gardening assigned him for his first
+      task by no means a hardship. He was rather critical of the Altrurian style
+      of hoe at first, but after he got the hang of it, as he said, he liked it
+      better, and during the three hours of the first morning's Obligatoires,
+      his ardor to cut all the weeds out at once had to be restrained rather
+      than prompted. He could not be persuaded to take five minutes for rest out
+      of every twenty, and he could not get over his life-long habit of working
+      against time. The Altrurians tried to make him understand that here people
+      must not work <i>against</i> time, but must always work <i>with</i> it, so
+      as to have enough work to do each day; otherwise they must remain idle
+      during the Obligatoires and tend to demoralize the workers. It seemed that
+      Lady Moors had a passion for gardening, and she was set to work with her
+      father on the border of flowers surrounding the vegetable patch he was
+      hoeing. She knew about flowers, and from her childhood had amused herself
+      by growing them, and so far from thinking it a hardship or disgrace to
+      dig, she was delighted to get at them. It was easy to see that she and her
+      father were cronies, and when I went round in the morning with Aristides
+      to ask if we could do anything for them, we heard them laughing and
+      talking gayly together before we reached them. They said they had looked
+      their job (as Mr. Thrall called it) over the afternoon before during the
+      Voluntaries, and had decided how they would manage, and they had set to
+      work that morning as soon as they had breakfast. Lady Moors had helped her
+      mother get the breakfast, and she seemed to regard the whole affair as a
+      picnic, though from the look of Mrs. Thrall's back, as she turned it on
+      me, when I saw her coming to the door of the marquee with a coffee-pot in
+      her hand, I decided that she was not yet resigned to her new lot in life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Moors was nowhere to be seen, and I felt some little curiosity about
+      him which was not quite anxiety. Later, as we were going back to our
+      quarters in the village, we saw him working on the road with a party of
+      Altrurians who were repairing a washout from an overnight rain. They were
+      having all kinds of a time, except a bad time, trying to understand each
+      other in their want of a common language. It appeared that the Altrurians
+      were impressed with his knowledge of road-making, and were doing something
+      which he had indicated to them by signs. We offered our services as
+      interpreters, and then he modestly owned in defence of his suggestions
+      that when he was at Oxford he had been one of the band of enthusiastic
+      undergraduates who had built a piece of highway under Mr. Ruskin's
+      direction. The Altrurians regarded his suggestions as rather amateurish,
+      but they were glad to act upon them, when they could, out of pure good
+      feeling and liking for him; and from time to time they rushed upon him and
+      shook hands with him; their affection did not go further, and he was able
+      to stand the handshaking, though he told us he hoped they would not feel
+      it necessary to keep it up, for it was really only a very simple matter
+      like putting a culvert in place of a sluice which they had been using to
+      carry the water off. They understood what he was saying, from his
+      gestures, and they crowded round us to ask whether he would like to join
+      them during the Voluntaries that afternoon, in getting the stone out of a
+      neighboring quarry, and putting in the culvert at once. We explained to
+      him, and he said he should be very happy. All the time he was looking at
+      them admirably, and he said, &ldquo;It's really very good,&rdquo; and we understood
+      that he meant their classic working-dress, and when he added, &ldquo;I should
+      really fancy trying it myself one day,&rdquo; and we told them they wanted to go
+      and bring him an Altrurian costume at once. But we persuaded them not to
+      urge him, and in fact he looked very fit for his work in his yachting
+      flannels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I talked him over a long time with Aristides, and tried to get his point
+      of view. I decided finally that an Englishman of his ancient lineage and
+      high breeding, having voluntarily come down to the level of an American
+      millionaire by marriage, could not feel that he was lowering himself any
+      further by working with his hands. In fact, he probably felt that his
+      merely undertaking a thing dignified the thing; but of course this was
+      only speculation on my part, and he may have been resigned to working for
+      a living because like poor people elsewhere he was obliged to do it.
+      Aristides thought there was a good deal in that idea, but it is hard for
+      an Altrurian to conceive of being ashamed of work, for they regard
+      idleness as pauperism, and they would look upon our leisure classes, so
+      far as we have them, very much as we look upon tramps, only they would
+      make the excuse for our tramps that they often cannot get work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had far more trouble with the servants than we had with the masters in
+      making them understand that they were to go to work in the fields and
+      shops, quite as the crew of the yacht had done. Some of them refused
+      outright, and stuck to their refusal until the village electrician rescued
+      them with the sort of net and electric filament which had been employed
+      with the recalcitrant sailors; others were brought to a better mind by
+      withholding food from them till they were willing to pay for it by
+      working. You will be sorry to learn, Dolly, that the worst of the rebels
+      were the ladies' maids, who, for the honor of our sex, ought not to have
+      required the application of the net and filament; but they had not such
+      appetites as the men-servants, and did not mind starving so much. However,
+      in a very short time they were at work, too, and more or less resigned,
+      though they did not profess to understand it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You will think me rather fickle, I am afraid, but after I made the
+      personal acquaintance of Mr. Thrall's <i>chef,</i> Anatole, I found my
+      affections dividing themselves between him and his lordship's man Robert,
+      my first love. But Anatole was magnificent, a gaunt, little, aquiline man,
+      with a branching mustache and gallant goatee, and having held an exalted
+      position at a salary of ten thousand a year from Mr. Thrall, he could
+      easily stoop from it, while poor Robert was tormented with misgivings, not
+      for himself, but for Lord and Lady Moors and Mr. Thrall. It became my
+      pleasing office to explain the situation to Monsieur Anatole, who, when he
+      imagined it, gave a cry of joy, and confessed, what he had never liked to
+      tell Mr. Thrall, knowing the misconceptions of Americans on the subject,
+      that he had belonged in France to a party of which the political and
+      social ideal was almost identical with that of the Altrurians. He asked
+      for an early opportunity of addressing the village Assembly and explaining
+      this delightful circumstance in public, and he profited by the occasion to
+      embrace the first Altrurian we met and kiss him on both cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His victim was a messenger from the Commune, who had been sent to inquire
+      whether Anatole had a preference as to the employment which should be
+      assigned to him, and I had to reply for him that he was a man of science;
+      that he would be happy to serve the republic in whatever capacity his
+      concitizens chose, but that he thought he could be most useful in studying
+      the comestible vegetation of the neighborhood, and the substitution of the
+      more succulent herbs for the flesh-meats to the use of which, he
+      understood from me, the Altrurians were opposed. In the course of his
+      preparation for the rôle of <i>chef</i>, which he had played both in
+      France and America, he had made a specialty of edible fungi; and the
+      result was that Anatole was set to mushrooming, and up to this moment he
+      has discovered no less than six species hitherto unknown to the Altrurian
+      table. This has added to their dietary in several important particulars,
+      the fungi he has discovered being among those highly decorative and
+      extremely poisonous-looking sorts which flourish in the deep woods and
+      offer themselves almost inexhaustibly in places near the ruins of the old
+      capitalistic cities, where hardly any other foods will grow. Anatole is
+      very proud of his success, and at more than one Communal Assembly has
+      lectured upon his discoveries and treated of their preparation for the
+      table, with sketches of them as he found them growing, colored after
+      nature by his own hand. He has himself become a fanatical vegetarian,
+      having, he confesses, always had a secret loathing for the meats he
+      stooped to direct the cooking of among the French and American bourgeoisie
+      in the days which he already looks back upon as among the most benighted
+      of his history.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0044" id="link2H_4_0044">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The scene has changed again, Dolly, and six months have elapsed without
+      your knowing it. Aristides and I long ago completed the tour of the
+      capitals which the Thrall incident interrupted, and we have been settled
+      for many months in the Maritime Capital, where it has been decided we had
+      better fill out the first two years of my husband's repatriation. I have
+      become more and more thoroughly naturalized, and if I am not yet a perfect
+      Altrurian, it is not for not loving better and better the best Altrurian
+      of them all, and not for not admiring and revering this wonderful
+      civilization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the Obligatories of the forenoons I do my housework with my own
+      hands, and as my mother lives with us we have long talks together, and try
+      to make each other believe that the American conditions were a sort of
+      nightmare from which we have happily awakened. You see how terribly frank
+      I am, my dear, but if I were not, I could not make you understand how I
+      feel. My heart aches for you, there, and the more because I know that you
+      do not want to live differently, that you are proud of your economic and
+      social illogicality, and that you think America is the best country under
+      the sun! I can never persuade you, but if you could only come here, once,
+      and see for yourselves! Seeing would be believing, and believing would be
+      the wish never to go away, but to be at home here always.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I can imagine your laughing at me and asking Mr. Makely whether the <i>Little
+      Sally</i> has ever returned to Altruria, and how I can account for the
+      captain's failure to keep his word. I confess that is a sore point with
+      me. It is now more than a year since she sailed, and, of course, we have
+      not had a sign or whisper from her. I could almost wish that the crew were
+      willing to stay away, but I am afraid it is the captain who is keeping
+      them. It has become almost a mania with me, and every morning, the first
+      thing when I wake, I go for my before-breakfast walk along the marble
+      terrace that overlooks the sea, and scan the empty rounding for the
+      recreant ship. I do not want to think so badly of human nature, as I must
+      if the <i>Little Sally</i> never comes back, and I am sure you will not
+      blame me if I should like her to bring me some word from you. I know that
+      if she ever reached Boston you got my letters and presents, and that you
+      have been writing me as faithfully as I have been writing you, and what a
+      sheaf of letters from you there will be if her masts ever pierce the
+      horizon! To tell the truth, I do long for a little American news! Do you
+      still keep on murdering and divorcing, and drowning, and burning, and
+      mommicking, and maiming people by sea and land? Has there been any war
+      since I left? Is the financial panic as great as ever, and is there as
+      much hunger and cold? I know that whatever your crimes and calamities are,
+      your heroism and martyrdom, your wild generosity and self-devotion, are
+      equal to them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is no use to pretend that in little over a year I can have become
+      accustomed to the eventlessness of life in Altruria. I go on for a good
+      many days together and do not miss the exciting incidents you have in
+      America, and then suddenly I am wolfishly hungry for the old sensations,
+      just as now and then I <i>want meat</i>, though I know I should loathe the
+      sight and smell of it if I came within reach of it. You would laugh, I
+      dare say, at the Altrurian papers, and what they print for news. Most of
+      the space is taken up with poetry, and character study in the form of
+      fiction, and scientific inquiry of every kind. But now and then there is a
+      report of the production of a new play in one of the capitals; or an
+      account of an open-air pastoral in one of the communes; or the progress of
+      some public work, like the extension of the National Colonnade; or the
+      wonderful liberation of some section from malaria; or the story of some
+      good man or woman's life, ended at the patriarchal age they reach here.
+      They also print selected passages of capitalistic history, from the
+      earliest to the latest times, showing how in war and pestilence and
+      needless disaster the world outside Altruria remains essentially the same
+      that it was at the beginning of civilization, with some slight changes
+      through the changes of human nature for the better in its slow approaches
+      to the Altrurian ideal. In noting these changes the writers get some sad
+      amusement out of the fact that the capitalistic world believes human
+      nature cannot be changed, though cannibalism and slavery and polygamy have
+      all been extirpated in the so-called Christian countries, and these things
+      were once human nature, which is always changing, while brute nature
+      remains the same. Now and then they touch very guardedly on that slavery,
+      worse than war, worse than any sin or shame conceivable to the Altrurians,
+      in which uncounted myriads of women are held and bought and sold, and they
+      have to note that in this the capitalistic world is without the hope of
+      better things. You know what I mean, Dolly; every good woman knows the
+      little she cannot help knowing; but if you had ever inquired into that
+      horror, as I once felt obliged to do, you would think it the blackest
+      horror of the state of things where it must always exist as long as there
+      are riches and poverty. Now, when so many things in America seem bad
+      dreams, I cannot take refuge in thinking that a bad dream; the reality was
+      so deeply burnt into my brain by the words of some of the slaves; and when
+      I think of it I want to grovel on the ground with my mouth in the dust.
+      But I know this can only distress you, for you cannot get away from the
+      fact as I have got away from it; that there it is in the next street,
+      perhaps in the next house, and that any night when you leave your home
+      with your husband, you may meet it at the first step from your door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You can very well imagine what a godsend the reports of Aristides and the
+      discussions of them have been to our papers. They were always taken down
+      stenographically, and they were printed like dialogue, so that at a little
+      distance you would take them at first for murder trials or divorce cases,
+      but when you look closer, you find them questions and answers about the
+      state of things in America. There are often humorous passages, for the
+      Altrurians are inextinguishably amused by our illogicality, and what they
+      call the perpetual <i>non sequiturs</i> of our lives and laws. In the
+      discussions they frequently burlesque these, but as they present them they
+      seem really beyond the wildest burlesque. Perhaps you will be surprised to
+      know that a nation of working-people like these feel more compassion than
+      admiration for our working-people. They pity them, but they blame them
+      more than they blame the idle rich for the existing condition of things in
+      America. They ask why, if the American workmen are in the immense
+      majority, they do not vote a true and just state, and why they go on
+      striking and starving their families instead; they cannot distinguish in
+      principle between the confederations of labor and the combinations of
+      capital, between the trusts and the trades-unions, and they condemn even
+      more severely the oppressions and abuses of the unions. My husband tries
+      to explain that the unions are merely provisional, and are a temporary
+      means of enabling the employees to stand up against the tyranny of the
+      employers, but they always come back and ask him if the workmen have not
+      most of the votes, and if they have, why they do not protect themselves
+      peacefully instead of organizing themselves in fighting shape, and making
+      a warfare of industry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is not often anything so much like news in the Altrurian papers as
+      the grounding of the Thrall yacht on the coast of the Seventh Region, and
+      the incident has been treated and discussed in every possible phase by the
+      editors and their correspondents. They have been very frank about it, as
+      they are about everything in Altruria, and they have not concealed their
+      anxieties about their unwelcome guests. They got on without much trouble
+      in the case of the few sailors of the <i>Little Sally</i>, but the crew of
+      the <i>Saraband</i> is so large that it is a different matter. In the
+      first place, they do not like the application of force, even in the mild
+      electrical form in which they employ it, and they fear that the effect
+      with themselves will be bad, however good it is for their guests. Besides,
+      they dread the influence which a number of people, invested with the charm
+      of strangeness, may have with the young men and especially the young girls
+      of the neighborhood. The hardest thing the Altrurians have to grapple with
+      is feminine curiosity, and the play of this about the strangers is what
+      they seek the most anxiously to control. Of course, you will think it
+      funny, and I must say that it seemed so to me at first, but I have come to
+      think it is serious. The Altrurian girls are cultivated and refined, but
+      as they have worked all their lives with their hands they cannot imagine
+      the difference that work makes in Americans; that it coarsens and classes
+      them, especially if they have been in immediate contact with rich people,
+      and been degraded or brutalized by the knowledge of the contempt in which
+      labor is held among us by those who are not compelled to it. Some of my
+      Altrurian friends have talked it over with me, and I could take their
+      point of view, though secretly I could not keep my poor American feelings
+      from being hurt when they said that to have a large number of people from
+      the capitalistic world thrown upon their hands was very much as it would
+      be with us if we had the same number of Indians, with all their tribal
+      customs and ideals, thrown upon our hands. They say they will not shirk
+      their duty in the matter, and will study it carefully; but all the same,
+      they wish the incident had not happened.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I am glad that I was called away from the disagreeable point I left in my
+      last, and that I have got back temporarily to the scene of the
+      Altrurianization of Mr. Thrall and his family. So far as it has gone it is
+      perfect, if I may speak from the witness of happiness in those concerned,
+      except perhaps Mrs. Thrall; she is as yet only partially reconstructed,
+      but even she has moments of forgetting her lost grandeur and of really
+      enjoying herself in her work. She is an excellent housekeeper, and she has
+      become so much interested in making the marquee a simple home for her
+      family that she is rather proud of showing it off as the effect of her
+      unaided efforts. She was allowed to cater to them from the canned meats
+      brought ashore from the yacht as long as they would stand it, but the
+      wholesome open-air conditions have worked a wonderful change in them, and
+      neither Mr. Thrall nor Lord and Lady Moors now have any taste for such
+      dishes. Here Mrs. Thrall's old-time skill as an excellent vegetable cook,
+      when she was the wife of a young mechanic, has come into play, and she
+      believes that she sets the best table in the whole neighborhood, with
+      fruits and many sorts of succulents and the everlasting and ever-pervading
+      mushrooms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the Altrurians do not wish to annoy their involuntary guests, or to
+      interfere with their way of life where they do not consider it immoral,
+      their control has ended with setting them to work for a living. They have
+      not asked them to the communal refectory, but, as long as they have been
+      content to serve each other, have allowed them their private table. Of
+      course, their adaptation to their new way of life has proceeded more
+      slowly than it otherwise would, but with the exception of Mrs. Thrall they
+      are very intelligent people, and I have been charmed in talking the
+      situation over with them. The trouble has not been so great with the
+      ship's people, as was feared. Such of these as have imagined their stay
+      here permanent, or wished it to be so, have been received into the
+      neighboring communes, and have taken the first steps towards
+      naturalization; those who look forward to getting away some time, or
+      express the wish for it, are allowed to live in a community of their own,
+      where they are not molested as long as they work in the three hours of the
+      Obligatoires. Naturally, they are kept out of mischief, but after their
+      first instruction in the ideas of public property and the impossibility of
+      enriching themselves at the expense of any one else, they have behaved
+      very well. The greatest trouble they ever gave was in trapping and killing
+      the wild things for food; but when they were told that this must not be
+      done, and taught to recognize the vast range of edible fungi, they took
+      not unwillingly to mushrooms and the ranker tubers and roots, from which,
+      with unlimited eggs, cheese, milk, and shell-fish, they have constructed a
+      diet of which they do not complain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This brings me rather tangentially to Monsieur Anatole, who has become a
+      fanatical Altrurian, and has even had to be restrained in some of his
+      enthusiastic plans for the compulsory naturalization of his fellow
+      castaways. His value as a scientist has been cordially recognized, and his
+      gifts as an artist in the exquisite water-color studies of edible fungi
+      has won his notice in the capital of the Seventh Regional where they have
+      been shown at the spring water-color exhibition. He has printed several
+      poems in the <i>Regional Gazette</i>, villanelles, rondeaux, and triolets,
+      with accompanying versions of the French, into Altrurian by one of the
+      first Altrurian poets. This is a widow of about Monsieur Anatole's own
+      age; and the literary friendship between them has ripened into something
+      much more serious. In fact they are engaged to be married. I suppose you
+      will laugh at this, Dolly, and at first I confess that there was enough of
+      the old American in me to be shocked at the idea of a French <i>chef</i>
+      marrying an Altrurian lady who could trace her descent to the first
+      Altrurian president of the Commonwealth, and who is universally loved and
+      honored. I could not help letting something of the kind escape me by
+      accident, to a friend, and presently Mrs. Chrysostom was sent to interview
+      me on the subject, and to learn just how the case appeared to me. This put
+      me on my honor, and I was obliged to say how it would appear in America,
+      though every moment I grew more and more ashamed of myself and my native
+      country, where we pretend that labor is honorable, and are always heaping
+      dishonor on it. I told how certain of our girls and matrons had married
+      their coachmen and riding-masters and put themselves at odds with society,
+      and I confessed that marrying a cook would be regarded as worse, if
+      possible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Chrysostom was accompanied by a lady in her second youth, very
+      graceful, very charmingly dressed, and with an expression of winning
+      intelligence, whom she named to me simply as Cecilia, in the Altrurian
+      fashion. She apparently knew no English, and at first Mrs. Chrysostom
+      translated each of her questions and my answers. When I had got through,
+      this lady began to question me herself in Altrurian, which I owned to
+      understanding a little. She said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know Anatole?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, certainly, and I like him, as I think every one must who knows him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is a skillful <i>chef</i>?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Thrall would not have paid him ten thousand dollars a year if he had
+      not been.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have seen some of his water-colors?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. They are exquisite. He is unquestionably an artist of rare talent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And it is known to you that he is a man of scientific attainments?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is something I cannot judge of so well as Aristides; but <i>he</i>
+      says M. Anatole is learned beyond any man he knows in edible fungi.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As an adoptive Altrurian, and knowing the American ideas from our point
+      of view, should you respect their ideas of social inequality?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not the least in the world. I understand as well as you do that their
+      ideas must prevail wherever one works for a living and another does not.
+      hose ideas are practically as much accepted in America as they are in
+      Europe, but I have fully renounced them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      You see, Dolly, how far I have gone!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The unknown, who could be pretty easily imagined, rose up and gave me her
+      hand. &ldquo;If you are in the Region on the third of May you must come to our
+      wedding.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The same afternoon I had a long talk with Mr. Thrall, whom I found at work
+      replanting a strawberry-patch during the Voluntaries. He rose up at the
+      sound of my voice, and after an old man's dim moment for getting me
+      mentally in focus, he brightened into a genial smile, and said, &ldquo;Oh, Mrs.
+      Homos! I am glad to see you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I told him to go on with his planting, and I offered to get down on my
+      knees beside him and help, but he gallantly handed me to a seat in the
+      shade beside his daughter's flower-bed, and it was there that we had a
+      long talk about conditions in America and Altruria, and how he felt about
+      the great change in his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I can truly say,&rdquo; he answered much more at length than I shall
+      report, &ldquo;that I have never been so happy since the first days of my
+      boyhood. All care has dropped from me; I don't feel myself rich, and I
+      don't feel myself poor in this perfect safety from want. The only thing
+      that gives me any regret is that my present state has not been the effect
+      of my own will and deed. If I am now following the greatest and truest of
+      all counsels it has not been because I have sold all and given to the
+      poor, but because my money has been mercifully taken from me, and I have
+      been released from its responsibilities in a state of things where there
+      is no money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, Mr. Thrall,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;don't you ever feel that you have a duty to
+      the immense fortune which you have left in America, and which must be
+      disposed of somehow when people are satisfied that you are not going to
+      return and dispose of it yourself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, none. I was long ago satisfied that I could really do no good with
+      it. Perhaps if I had had more faith in it I might have done some good with
+      it, but I believe that I never did anything but harm, even when I seemed
+      to be helping the most, for I was aiding in the perpetuation of a state of
+      things essentially wrong. Now, if I never go back&mdash;and I never wish
+      to go back&mdash;let the law dispose of it as seems best to the
+      authorities. I have no kith or kin, and my wife has none, so there is no
+      one to feel aggrieved by its application to public objects.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And how do you imagine it will be disposed of?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I suppose for charitable and educational purposes. Of course a good
+      deal of it will go in graft; but that cannot be helped.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if you could now dispose of it according to your clearest ideas of
+      justice, and if you were forced to make the disposition yourself, what
+      would you do with it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, that is something I have been thinking of, and as nearly as I can
+      make out, I ought to go into the records of my prosperity and ascertain
+      just how and when I made my money. Then I ought to seek out as fully as
+      possible the workmen who helped me make it by their labor. Their wages,
+      which, were always the highest, were never a fair share, though I forced
+      myself to think differently, and it should be my duty to inquire for them
+      and pay them each a fair share, or, if they are dead, then their children
+      or their next of kin. But even when I had done this I should not be sure
+      that I had not done them more harm than good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      How often I had heard poor Mr. Strange say things like this, and heard of
+      other rich men saying them, after lives of what is called beneficence! Mr.
+      Thrall drew a deep sigh, and cast a longing look at his strawberry-bed. I
+      laughed, and said, &ldquo;You are anxious to get back to your plants, and I
+      won't keep you. I wonder if Mrs. Thrall could see me if I called; or Lady
+      Moors?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He said he was sure they would, and I took my way over to the marquee. I
+      was a little surprised to be met at the door by Lord Moors' man Robert. He
+      told me he was very sorry, but her ladyship was helping his lordship at a
+      little job on the roads, which they were doing quite in the Voluntaries,
+      with the hope of having the National Colonnade extended to a given point;
+      the ladies were helping the gentlemen get the place in shape. He was still
+      sorrier, but I not so much, that Mrs. Thrall was lying down and would like
+      to be excused; she was rather tired from putting away the luncheon things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He asked me if I would not sit down, and he offered me one of the
+      camp-stools at the door of the marquee, and I did sit down for a moment,
+      while he flitted about the interior doing various little things. At last I
+      said, &ldquo;How is this, Robert? I thought you had been assigned to a place in
+      the communal refectory. You're not here on the old terms?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He came out and stood respectfully holding a dusting-cloth in his hand.
+      &ldquo;Thank you, not exactly, ma'am. But the fact is, ma'am, that the communal
+      monitors have allowed me to come back here a few hours in the afternoon,
+      on what I may call terms of my own.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't understand. But won't you sit down, Robert?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you, if it is the same to you, ma'am, I would rather stand while
+      I'm here. In the refectory, of course, it's different.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But about your own terms?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks. You see, ma'am, I've thought all along it was a bit awkward for
+      them here, they not being so much used to looking after things, and I
+      asked leave to come and help now and then. Of course, they said that I
+      could not be allowed to serve for hire in Altruria; and one thing led to
+      another, and I said it would really be a favor to me, and I didn't expect
+      money for my work, for I did not suppose I should ever be where I could
+      use it again, but if they would let me come here and do it for&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Robert stopped and blushed and looked down, and I took the word, &ldquo;For
+      love?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, ma'am, that's what they called it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dolly, it made the tears come into my eyes, and I said very solemnly,
+      &ldquo;Robert, do you know, I believe you are the sweetest soul even in this and
+      flowing with milk and honey?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you mustn't say that, ma'am. There's Mr. Thrall and his lordship and
+      her ladyship. I'm sure they would do the like for me if I needed their
+      help. And there are the Altrurians, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But they are used to it, Robert, and&mdash;Robert! Be frank with me! What
+      do you think of Altruria?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite frank, ma'am, as if you were not connected with it, as you are?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite frank.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, ma'am, if you are sure you wouldn't mind it, or consider it out of
+      the way for me, I should say it was&mdash;rum.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Rum</i>? Don't you think it is beautiful here, to see people living
+      for each other instead of living <i>on</i> each other, and the whole
+      nation like one family, and the country a paradise?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, that's just it, ma'am, if you won't mind my saying so. That's what
+      I mean by rum.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Won't you explain?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It doesn't seem <i>real</i>. Every night when I go to sleep, and think
+      that there isn't a thief or a policeman on the whole continent, and only a
+      few harmless homicides, as you call them, that wouldn't hurt a fly, and
+      not a person hungry or cold, and no poor and no rich, and no servants and
+      no masters, and no soldiers, and no&mdash;disreputable characters, it
+      seems as if I was going to wake up in the morning and find myself on the
+      <i>Saraband</i> and it all a dream here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Robert,&rdquo; I had to own, &ldquo;that was the way with me, too, for a long
+      while. And even now I have dreams about America and the way matters are
+      there, and I wake myself weeping for fear Altruria <i>isn't</i> true.
+      Robert! You must be honest with me! When you are awake, and it's broad
+      day, and you see how happy every one is here, either working or playing,
+      and the whole land without an ugly place in it, and the lovely villages
+      and the magnificent towns, and everything, does it still seem&mdash;rum?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's like that, ma'am, at times. I don't say at all times.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you don't believe that the rest of the world&mdash;England and
+      America&mdash;will ever be rum, too?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't see how they can. You see the poor are against it as well as the
+      rich. Everybody wants to have something of his own, and the trouble seems
+      to come from that. I don't suppose it was brought about in a day, Altruria
+      wasn't, ma'am?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, it was whole centuries coming.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was what I understood from that Mr. Chrysostom&mdash;Cyril, he wants
+      me to call him, but I can't quite make up my mouth to it&mdash;who speaks
+      English, and says he has been in England. He was telling me about it, one
+      day when we were drying the dishes at the refectory together. He says they
+      used to have wars and trusts and trades-unions here in the old days, just
+      as we do now in civilized countries.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you don't consider Altruria civilized?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, not in just that sense of the word, ma'am. You wouldn't call heaven
+      civilized?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, not in just that sense of the word. Robert.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see, it's rum here, because, though everything seems to go so right,
+      it's against human nature.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Altrurians say it isn't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope I don't differ from you, ma'am, but what would people&mdash;the
+      best people&mdash;at home say? They would say it wasn't reasonable; they
+      would say it wasn't even possible. That's what makes me think it's a dream&mdash;that
+      it's rum. Begging your pardon, ma'am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I quite understand, Robert. Then you don't believe a camel can ever
+      go through the eye of a needle?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't quite see how, ma'am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you are proof of as great a miracle, Robert.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Beg your pardon, ma'am?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some day I will explain. But is there nothing that can make you believe
+      Altruria is true here, and that it can be true anywhere?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been thinking a good deal about that, ma'am. One doesn't quite
+      like to go about in a dream, or think one is dreaming, and I have got to
+      saying to myself that if some ship was to come here from England or
+      America, or even from Germany, and we could compare our feelings with the
+      feelings of people who were fresh to it, we might somehow get to believe
+      that it was real.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I had to own. &ldquo;We need fresh proofs from time to time. There was a
+      ship that sailed from here something over a year ago, and the captain
+      promised his crew to let them bring her back, but at times I am afraid
+      that was part of the dream, too, and that we're all something I am
+      dreaming about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just so, ma'am,&rdquo; Robert said, and I came away downhearted enough, though
+      he called after me, &ldquo;Mrs. Thrall will be very sorry, ma'am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Back in the Maritime Capital, and oh, Dolly, Dolly, Dolly! They have
+      sighted the <i>Little Sally</i> from the terrace! How happy I am! There
+      will be letters from you, and I shall hear all that has happened in
+      America, and I shall never again doubt that Altruria is real! I don't know
+      how I shall get these letters of mine back to you, but somehow it can be
+      managed. Perhaps the <i>Saraband's</i> crew will like to take the <i>Little
+      Sally</i> home again; perhaps when Mr. Thrall knows the ship is here he
+      will want to buy it and go back to his money in America and the misery of
+      it! Do you believe he will? Should I like to remind my husband of his
+      promise to take me home on a visit? Oh, my heart misgives me! I wonder if
+      the captain of the <i>Little Sally</i> has brought his wife and children
+      with him, and is going to settle among us, or whether he has just let his
+      men have the vessel, and they have come to Altruria without him? I dare
+      not ask anything, I dare not think anything!
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      THE END
+    </h3>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Through the Eye of the Needle, by
+William Dean Howells
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+  </body>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #8295 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8295)
diff --git a/old/8295-h.htm.2021-01-26 b/old/8295-h.htm.2021-01-26
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+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      Through the Eye of The Needle, by William Dean Howells
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
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+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
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+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
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+
+Project Gutenberg's Through the Eye of the Needle, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Through the Eye of the Needle
+       A Romance
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+
+Release Date: June, 2005 [EBook #8295]
+This file was first posted on July 26, 2003
+Last Updated: February 25, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THROUGH THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Musser, Charles Franks, David Widger,
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      THROUGH THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE
+    </h1>
+    <h3>
+      A Romance
+    </h3>
+    <h4>
+      With An Introduction
+    </h4>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By William Dean Howells
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      1907
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_INTR"> INTRODUCTION </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_PART"> <b>PART FIRST</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> I </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> II </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> III </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> IV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> V </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> VI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> VII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> VIII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> IX </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> X </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> XI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> XII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0015"> XIII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0016"> XIV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0017"> XV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0018"> XVI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0019"> XVII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0020"> XVIII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> XIX </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0022"> XX </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0023"> XXI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0024"> XXII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0025"> XXIII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0026"> XXIV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0027"> XXV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0028"> XXVI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0029"> XXVII </a><br />
+    </p>
+
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_PART2"> <b>PART SECOND</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0031"> I </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0032"> II </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0033"> III </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0034"> IV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0035"> V </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0036"> VI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0037"> VII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0038"> VIII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0039"> IX </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0040"> X </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0041"> XI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0042"> XII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0043"> XIII </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0044"> XIV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_INTR" id="link2H_INTR">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      INTRODUCTION
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>upon</i> each other as the Americans do, instead of
+      <i>for</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;like the sweet
+      South, taking and giving odor.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PART" id="link2H_PART">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART FIRST
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      THROUGH THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>en famille;</i>
+      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&mdash;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. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>now?</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This and the parlors count three, and the kitchen here is the fourth room
+      of the eight,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She showed me the set range, at one side, and the refrigerator in an
+      alcove, which she said went with the flat, and, &ldquo;Lena,&rdquo; she said to the
+      cook, &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The cook said, &ldquo;Oh yes, ma'am,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;Of course, it's
+      an expense,&rdquo; she said, as she closed the kitchen door after us. She added,
+      in a low, rapid tone, &ldquo;You must excuse my introducing the cook. She has
+      read all about you in the papers&mdash;you didn't know, I suppose, that
+      there were reporters that day of your delightful talk in the mountains,
+      but I had them&mdash;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,&rdquo; she ran
+      on, without a moment's pause, while she flung open another door, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes,&rdquo; I said, and she shut the elevator door and opened another a
+      little beyond it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is our guest chamber,&rdquo; she continued, as she ushered me into a very
+      pretty room, charmingly furnished. &ldquo;It isn't very light by day, for it
+      opens on a court, like the kitchen and the servants' room here,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;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.&rdquo; I did not say that I did not see, and this sufficed Mrs. Makely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I'll show you <i>our</i> rooms,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at me, and I praised the room and its dainty tastefulness to
+      her heart's content, so that she said: &ldquo;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&mdash;drawing-room. This is the end of the story.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said her husband, with a wink at me, &ldquo;I thought it was to be
+      continued in our next,&rdquo; and he nodded towards the door that opened from
+      his wife's bower into the room adjoining.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, you poor old fellow!&rdquo; she shouted. &ldquo;I forgot all about <i>your</i>
+      room,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;And here,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;he can smoke, or anything, as long as
+      he keeps the door shut. Oh, good gracious! I forgot the bath-room,&rdquo; 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.
+      &ldquo;Put out the electrics, Dick!&rdquo; she called back over her shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Now, isn't it about perfect?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see very little to criticise,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;from your point of view; but I
+      hope you won't think it indiscreet if I ask a few questions?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed. &ldquo;Ask anything, Mr. Homos! I hope I got hardened to your
+      questions in the mountains.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She said you used to get off some pretty tough ones,&rdquo; said her husband,
+      helpless to take his eyes from her, although he spoke to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is about your servants,&rdquo; I began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, of course! Perfectly characteristic! Go on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You told me that they had no natural light either in the kitchen or their
+      bedroom. Do they never see the light of day?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The lady laughed heartily. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, except for that afternoon once a week, your cook lives in
+      electric-light perpetually?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Electric-light is very healthy, and it doesn't heat the air!&rdquo; the lady
+      triumphed, &ldquo;I can assure you that she thinks she's very well off; and so
+      she is.&rdquo; I felt a little temper in her voice, and I was silent, until she
+      asked me, rather stiffly, &ldquo;Is there any <i>other</i> inquiry you would
+      like to make?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;but I do not think you would like it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, why should you require your servants to go down on a different
+      elevator from yourselves?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, good gracious!&rdquo; cried the lady.&mdash;&ldquo;aren't they different from us
+      in <i>every</i> 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 <i>front</i>
+      elevator? I don't want to go up and down with my own cook, and I certainly
+      don't with my neighbor's cook!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;It is only that in Altruria we
+      hold serving in peculiar honor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the lady, scornfully, &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Business,&rdquo; suggested her husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she assented, as if this clinched the matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's what I'm always telling you, Dolly, and yet you <i>will</i> 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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are there many seeking employment?&rdquo; I asked this because I thought it was
+      safe ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, they just stand around in the office as <i>thick!</i>&rdquo; said the
+      lady. &ldquo;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,&rdquo; she continued, with a
+      lingering ire in her voice, &ldquo;that in Altruria you do treat them as one of
+      the family?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have no servants, in the American sense,&rdquo; I answered, as inoffensively
+      as I could.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Makely irrelevantly returned to the question that had first provoked
+      her indignation. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should think it was no worse,&rdquo; I admitted, and I thought this a good
+      chance to turn the talk from the dangerous channel it had taken. &ldquo;I wish,
+      Mrs. Makely, you would tell me something about the way people live in
+      separate houses in New York.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was instantly pacified. &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed and said, &ldquo;Why, it's just like any other house!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Another contradiction!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;I
+      suppose you mean a brown-stone, four-story house in the middle of a
+      block?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I think that is what I mean,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; she began, &ldquo;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&mdash;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&mdash;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the front door,&rdquo; Mrs. Makely explained, &ldquo;where people come in,
+      and then begins the misery of a house&mdash;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&mdash;draw it, Dick&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll go back to a house yet, Dolly,&rdquo; said her husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never!&rdquo; she almost shrieked, and he winked at me, as if it were the best
+      joke in the world. &ldquo;Never, as long as houses have stairs!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Put in an elevator,&rdquo; he suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, that is what Eveleth Strange has, and she lets the servants use it,
+      too,&rdquo; and Mrs. Makely said, with a look at me: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what is an English-basement house like?&rdquo; I ventured to ask, in
+      interruption of the retrospective melancholy she had fallen into.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, <i>never</i> live in an English-basement house, if you value your
+      spine!&rdquo; cried the lady. &ldquo;An English-basement house is nothing <i>but</i>
+      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 <i>up</i>, and <i>never</i>
+      down. If I had my way, there wouldn't one stone be left upon another in
+      the English-basements in New York.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, of course,&rdquo; she began, &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ten or twelve thousand a year&mdash;fifteen,&rdquo; answered her husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, fully that,&rdquo; she answered, with an effect of disappointment in his
+      figures. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite,&rdquo; said Mr. Makely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the young people,&rdquo; I urged&mdash;&ldquo;those who are just starting in life&mdash;how
+      do they manage? Say when the husband has $1500 or $2000 a year?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor things!&rdquo; she returned. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if they didn't?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her husband nodded his acquiescence. &ldquo;Fighting-cock wouldn't be in it,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;Trouble is, we all want to do the swell thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you can't all do it,&rdquo; I ventured, &ldquo;and, from what I see of the
+      simple, out-of-the-way neighborhoods in my walks, you don't all try.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, no,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, that's all very well,&rdquo; said his wife; &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But there is no obligation to do either?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes, there is,&rdquo; she returned. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That means the woman's husband, too,&rdquo; said Mr. Makely, with his wink for
+      me. &ldquo;Always die together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;I know it,&rdquo; she
+      said. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;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 <i>won't</i> mind my laughing? Do go on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Now, I'll
+      tell you,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;After we broke up housekeeping in Thirty-third
+      Street, we stored our furniture&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Excuse me,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;How&mdash;stored?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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 <i>glad</i> 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&mdash;the storage cost as much as the
+      rent of a small house&mdash;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&mdash;excuse me, Mr. Homos: <i>domestic</i>&mdash;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.&rdquo; I have
+      found this is a favorite phrase of Mrs. Makely's, and that it seems to
+      give her a great deal of comfort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you don't feel that there's any harm in it?&rdquo; I ventured to ask.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Harm in it?&rdquo; she repeated. &ldquo;Why, aren't the poor things glad to get the
+      work? What would they do without it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From what I see of your conditions I should be afraid that they would
+      starve,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, they can't all get places in shops or restaurants, and they have to
+      do something, or starve, as you say,&rdquo; she said; and she seemed to think
+      what I had said was a concession to her position.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if it were your own case?&rdquo; I suggested. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw her flush, and she answered, haughtily, &ldquo;You must excuse me if I
+      refuse to imagine myself taking a servant's place, even for the sake of
+      argument.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you are quite right,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To my great astonishment she seemed delighted by this conclusion. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo;
+       she said, and she smiled radiantly, &ldquo;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&mdash;and everything. Besides,&rdquo;
+       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, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And it never seems to you that the whole relation is wrong?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What relation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That between maid and mistress, the hirer and the hireling.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, good gracious!&rdquo; she burst out. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It might be done for you, when you could not do it yourself, from
+      affection.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From affection!&rdquo; she returned, with the deepest derision. &ldquo;Well, I rather
+      think I <i>shall</i> have to do it myself if I want it done from
+      affection! But I suppose you think I <i>ought</i> 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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's simply business,&rdquo; her husband said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The men,&rdquo; said Mrs. Makely, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>I</i> don't, Dolly,&rdquo; suggested her husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, <i>you</i> don't, Dick,&rdquo; she returned, fondly. &ldquo;But there are not
+      many like you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He went on, with a wink at me, &ldquo;I never live at the club, except in
+      summer, when you go away to the mountains.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you know I can't very well take you with me,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I couldn't leave my business, anyway,&rdquo; he said, and he laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      X
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do many of the husbands left behind in the summer live at the club?&rdquo; I
+      asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All that <i>have</i> a club do,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He laughed, and his wife said: &ldquo;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,&rdquo; she continued, addressing me, &ldquo;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,&rdquo; she said, with that wonderful, unintentional,
+      or at least unconscious, frankness of hers, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do women go much to them?&rdquo; I asked, choosing this question as a safe one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Much</i>!&rdquo; she screamed. &ldquo;They don't go at all! They <i>can't</i>!
+      They won't <i>let</i> 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&rdquo;&mdash;she indicated her husband&mdash;&ldquo;are sitting up,
+      smoking and telling stories, it isn't to be dreamed of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her husband laughed. &ldquo;You wouldn't like the smoking, Dolly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nor the stories, some of them,&rdquo; she retorted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, the stories are always first-rate,&rdquo; he said, and he laughed more than
+      before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And they never gossip at the clubs, Mr. Homos&mdash;never!&rdquo; she added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, hardly ever,&rdquo; said her husband, with an intonation that I did not
+      understand. It seemed to be some sort of catch-phrase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All I know,&rdquo; said Mrs. Makely, &ldquo;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!&rdquo; She looked fondly at him, as if this
+      were one of the greatest merits in the world. &ldquo;But I confess I shouldn't
+      like him to be a mere club man, like some of them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, belonging to five or six, or more, even; and spending their whole
+      time at them, when they're not at business.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;And if the
+      ladies are not admitted to the men's clubs, why don't they have clubs of
+      their own?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, they have&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you go out and select the things yourself the day before, or in the
+      morning?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo; Her husband gave me one of his queer looks, and she went on: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;And that is
+      the way that people usually manage?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;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&mdash;or she did do it when she was in the country; I dare
+      say she won't when she gets back&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      But I am allowing myself to wander too far from Mrs. Makely and her
+      letter, which reached me only two days before Thanksgiving.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;MY DEAR MR. HOMOS,&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With Mr. Makely's best regards,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yours cordially,
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      &ldquo;DOROTHEA MAKELY.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Sphinx,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;November the twenty sixth,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eighteen hundred and Ninety-three.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;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
+      <i>me</i> out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed, and said: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0015" id="link2H_4_0015">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;No, a memory,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then,&rdquo; she added, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0016" id="link2H_4_0016">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;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,&rdquo; he added, in a burlesque whisper, behind
+      his hand, &ldquo;are the&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Canvasback duck?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, now,&rdquo; Mrs. Makely proclaimed, in high delight with her triumph, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0017" id="link2H_4_0017">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;You
+      must have been glad, Mrs. Strange,&rdquo; he said to the lady at my side, &ldquo;to
+      get back to our American oysters. There seems nothing else so potent to
+      bring us home from Europe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid,&rdquo; she answered, &ldquo;that I don't care so much for the American
+      oyster as I should. But I am certainly glad to get back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In time for the turkey, perhaps?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I care no more for the turkey than for the oyster of my native land,&rdquo;
+       said the lady.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I should not have missed him, either,&rdquo; persisted the lady.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What could one have missed,&rdquo; the gentleman said, with a bow to the
+      hostess, &ldquo;in the dinner Mrs. Makely has given us? If there had been
+      nothing, I should not have missed it,&rdquo; and when the laugh at his drolling
+      had subsided he asked Mrs. Strange: &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The American dinner-party,&rdquo; said the lady, with the same burlesque.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he consented, &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think we are every year a little more European,&rdquo; said the lady. &ldquo;One
+      notices it on getting home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I supposed we were so European already,&rdquo; returned the gentleman, &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, by all means!&rdquo; cried the hostess.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; I protested, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must say, I think they're both much nicer,&rdquo; said Mrs. Makely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is livelier,&rdquo; suggested Mrs. Makely, again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing of the kind!&rdquo; cried Mrs. Makely. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The gentleman laughed. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Mrs. Makely, &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You forget the American woman,&rdquo; suggested the gentleman. &ldquo;She is always
+      American, and she is always in society.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; returned our hostess, with a thoughtful air, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the gentleman, &ldquo;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 <i>you</i> think, Mr. Homos?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;How
+      does your observation coincide with my experience?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I!&rdquo; our hostess protested. But then she perceived that he was joking, and
+      she let me answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; he returned, &ldquo;that you reserve your <i>opinion</i> of our more
+      artificial society; but you may be sure that our reporters will get it out
+      of you yet before you leave us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Those horrid reporters!&rdquo; one of the ladies irrelevantly sighed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gentleman resumed: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Homos, you know,&rdquo; Mrs. Makely explained for me, as if this were the
+      aptest moment, &ldquo;thinks we all ought to work. He thinks we oughtn't to have
+      any servants.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh no, my dear lady,&rdquo; I put in. &ldquo;I don't think that of you as you <i>are</i>.
+      None of you could see more plainly than I do that in your conditions you
+      <i>must</i> have servants, and that you cannot possibly work unless
+      poverty obliges you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Sometimes,&rdquo; she
+      said, &ldquo;I wish we had to work, all of us, and that we could be freed from
+      our servile bondage to servants.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0018" id="link2H_4_0018">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XVI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+      &ldquo;Dining, you know, means overeating,&rdquo; he explained, &ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gentleman who had talked so much already said: &ldquo;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&mdash;yours was very good, Makely; I wish I had
+      taken more of it&mdash;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 <i>ad libitum</i>; 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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, then the women would insist upon our making it four-o'clock tea,&rdquo;
+       said another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;Shall we join the
+      ladies?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Makely hailed me with, &ldquo;Ah, Mr. Homos, I'm so glad you've come! We
+      poor women have been having a most dismal time!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Honestly,&rdquo; asked the funny gentleman, &ldquo;don't you always, without us?&rdquo;
+       &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A little more than kin and less than kind, perhaps,&rdquo; the gentleman
+      suggested. &ldquo;But what does she propose to do about it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned towards Mrs. Strange, who answered, &ldquo;Nothing. What does any one
+      propose to do about it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, why do you think about it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't. It thinks about itself. Do you know that poem of Longfellow's,
+      'The Challenge'?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I never heard of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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, <i>apropos de rien:</i>
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     '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.'&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; said the facetious gentleman, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0019" id="link2H_4_0019">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XVII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;But Eveleth Strange wouldn't do that,&rdquo;
+       she explained, &ldquo;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 <i>begin</i> to approve of <i>me;</i> 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&mdash;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>I</i>
+      know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0020" id="link2H_4_0020">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XVIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;that is what I find such a comfort in Mr. Twelvemough's
+      books.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We were speaking of Mr. Twelvemough's books,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The painter asked, Why was it not art?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Precisely,&rdquo; said the painter&mdash;&ldquo;art <i>is</i> choice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On that ground,&rdquo; the banker interposed, &ldquo;you could say that political
+      economy was a fit subject for art, if an artist chose to treat it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would have its difficulties,&rdquo; the painter admitted, &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>I</i> should object very much, for one,&rdquo; said the lady who had
+      objected to the account of the surgical operation. &ldquo;It would be too
+      creepy. Art should give pleasure.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you think a tragedy is not art?&rdquo; asked the painter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think that these harrowing subjects are brought in altogether too
+      much,&rdquo; said the lady. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, it wouldn't cost me any money there. I shouldn't have to give.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You oughtn't to give money in real life,&rdquo; said the lady. &ldquo;You ought to
+      give charity tickets. If the beggars refuse them, it shows they are
+      impostors.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's some comfort to know that the charities are so active,&rdquo; said the
+      elderly young lady, &ldquo;even if half the letters one gets <i>do</i> turn out
+      to be appeals from them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's very disappointing to have them do it, though,&rdquo; said the artist,
+      lightly. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Mr. Bullion, &ldquo;perhaps they have suspended during the hard
+      times.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;Who goes there?&rdquo;
+       the houselessness that prowls the night could have answered them from the
+      street below, &ldquo;Despair!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had an amusing experience,&rdquo; Mr. Twelvemough began, &ldquo;when I was doing a
+      little visiting for the charities in our ward, the other winter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For the sake of the literary material?&rdquo; the artist suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A checkered employ,&rdquo; the banker mused aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was not of a simultaneous nature,&rdquo; the novelist explained. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The novelist paused, and nobody laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems to me that your experience is instructive, rather than amusing,&rdquo;
+       said the banker. &ldquo;It shows that something can be done, if you try.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Mr. Twelvemough, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Everybody laughed now, and I looked at my hostess in a little
+      bewilderment. She murmured, &ldquo;I suppose the joke is that he had befriended
+      one man at the expense of six others.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; I returned, &ldquo;is that a joke?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No one answered, but the lady at my right asked, &ldquo;How do you manage with
+      poverty in Altruria?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw the banker fix a laughing eye on me, but I answered, &ldquo;In Altruria we
+      have no poverty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, I knew you would say that!&rdquo; he cried out. &ldquo;That's what he always
+      does,&rdquo; he explained to the lady. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the banker at last, &ldquo;if there is no cure for our poverty, we
+      might as well go on and enjoy ourselves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said our hostess, with a sad little smile, &ldquo;we might as well enjoy
+      ourselves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;Don't go! I mean it! Stay, and tell us about Altruria&mdash;my
+      mother and me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>poseuse</i> 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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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,&rdquo; she went on, with a sad mockery,
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;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 <i>have</i> a soul, you must long to help, not for a time,
+      but for all time. I suppose,&rdquo; she asked, abruptly, &ldquo;that Mrs. Makely has
+      told you something about me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something,&rdquo; I admitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ask,&rdquo; she went on, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo; She laughed again, more gayly, and recovered
+      herself in a cheerfuller and easier mood. &ldquo;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, <i>no</i> 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&mdash;to go mad and be put into an asylum, or
+      go mad and devote yourself to society.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0022" id="link2H_4_0022">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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:
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, people <i>never</i> do the charity that Christ meant,&rdquo; said Mrs.
+      Strange; &ldquo;and, as things are now, how <i>could</i> they? Who would dream
+      of dividing half her frocks and wraps with poor women, or selling <i>all</i>
+      and giving to the poor? That is what makes it so hopeless. We <i>know</i>
+      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 <i>you</i> manage about that?&rdquo;
+       she asked me; and then she added, &ldquo;But, of course, I forgot that you have
+      no need of charity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes, we have,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;dead-level of
+      equality&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Women,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;are exterior to your conditions, and they can sacrifice
+      themselves without wronging any one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or, rather,&rdquo; she continued, &ldquo;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&mdash;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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'It curseth him that gives, and him that takes.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;that Mrs. Makely told you something of my
+      marriage?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eveleth!&rdquo; her mother protested, with a gentle murmur.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is what we think,&rdquo; I ventured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eveleth!&rdquo; her mother murmured again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes,&rdquo; she answered, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0023" id="link2H_4_0023">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My husband,&rdquo; Mrs. Strange went on, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eveleth,&rdquo; said her mother, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At this protest, Mrs. Strange seemed to recover herself a little. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo;
+       she said, &ldquo;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&mdash;I don't know what&mdash;that will not let me keep
+      the truth from you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She gazed at me entreatingly, and then, as if some strong emotion swept
+      her from her own hold, she broke out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what has your conclusion been?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have seen the meaning and purport of Altruria so clearly,&rdquo; I said,
+      &ldquo;that I think I can safely leave you to guess the answer to that
+      question.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0024" id="link2H_4_0024">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0025" id="link2H_4_0025">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you excuse me, Mr. Homos,&rdquo; she began, &ldquo;if I ask you whether you
+      intend to make America your home after this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh no!&rdquo; 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.
+      &ldquo;How could I do that?&rdquo; 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.
+      &ldquo;I mean, by getting naturalized, and becoming a citizen, and taking up
+      your residence among us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; I answered, as quietly as I could, &ldquo;I had not thought of that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you still intend to go back to Altruria?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope so; I ought to have gone back long ago, and if I had not met the
+      friends I have in this house&mdash;&rdquo; I stopped, for I did not know how I
+      should end what I had begun to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am glad you think we are your friends,&rdquo; said the lady, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Say anything to me, my dear lady,&rdquo; I returned. &ldquo;I shall not think it
+      unkind, no matter how odd it is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, it's nothing. It's merely that&mdash;that when you are not here with
+      us I lose my grasp on Altruria, and&mdash;and I begin to doubt&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I smiled. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh no!&rdquo; she answered, fervently. &ldquo;Everybody that I have heard speak of
+      you has the highest regard for you, and believes you perfectly sincere.
+      But&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what?&rdquo; I entreated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They think you may be mistaken.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then they think I am out of my wits&mdash;that I am in an hallucination!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, not that,&rdquo; she returned. &ldquo;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&mdash;it seems ridiculous.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I confessed, &ldquo;I know that it seems so to the Americans.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;if you will let me have your atlas&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head. &ldquo;It would be the same again as soon as you went away.&rdquo;
+       I could not conceal my distress, and she went on: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then Mrs. Strange isn't troubled, as you are, concerning me?&rdquo; I asked,
+      and I confess my anxiety attenuated my voice almost to a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;that makes me all the
+      more anxious that she should not deceive herself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Mrs. Gray!&rdquo; I could not keep a certain tone of reproach out of my
+      words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She began to weep. &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is just it,&rdquo; she returned. &ldquo;Nobody can imagine the first Christians,
+      and do you think we can imagine anything like them in our own day?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But Mrs. Strange&mdash;she imagines us, you say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;and now I have so much more! If she is in
+      the house, won't you send to her? I can make her understand&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I stopped at a certain expression which I fancied I saw in Mrs. Gray's
+      face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Homos,&rdquo; she began, so very seriously that my heart trembled with a
+      vague misgiving, &ldquo;sometimes I think you had better not see my daughter any
+      more.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not see her any more?&rdquo; I gasped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;I am afraid that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I am not uncanny to <i>her!</i>&rdquo; I entreated. &ldquo;I am not unnatural,
+      not incredible&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She rose from her chair, and I, perforce, rose from mine and made a
+      movement towards her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I don't need any help. You must come again soon and
+      see us, and show that you've forgotten what I've said.&rdquo; She gave me her
+      hand, and I could not help bending over it and kissing it. She gave a
+      little, pathetic whimper. &ldquo;Oh, I <i>know</i> I've said the most dreadful
+      things to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You haven't said anything that takes your friendship from me, Mrs. Gray,
+      and that is what I care for.&rdquo; My own eyes filled with tears&mdash;I do not
+      know why&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are going?&rdquo; a whisper said. &ldquo;Why are you going?&rdquo; And Eveleth had me
+      by the hand and was drawing me gently into the dim drawing-room that
+      opened from the place. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, my dearest!&rdquo; I said, and why I said this I do not know, or how we
+      found ourselves in each other's arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are we doing?&rdquo; she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't believe I am an impostor, an illusion, a visionary?&rdquo; I besought
+      her, straining her closer to my heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe in you, with all my soul!&rdquo; she answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0026" id="link2H_4_0026">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;It must
+      be very weird,&rdquo; the man said; &ldquo;something like being engaged to a
+      materialization.&rdquo; &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the girl, &ldquo;quite the Demon Lover business, I
+      should think.&rdquo; 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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0027" id="link2H_4_0027">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; she explained, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;you will always be with us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then,&rdquo; she pursued, with a smile, &ldquo;when shall <i>you</i> come
+      back?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, never!&rdquo; I answered. &ldquo;No one ever leaves Altruria, if he can help it,
+      unless he is sent on a mission.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked a little mystified, and I went on: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You won't come to live in America?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God forbid!&rdquo; said I, and I am afraid I could not hide the horror that ran
+      through me at the thought. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was silent, and I asked: &ldquo;But, surely, you understood this, Mrs.
+      Gray?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said, reluctantly. &ldquo;Does Eveleth?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, certainly,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;We have talked it over a hundred times. Hasn't
+      she&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; she returned, with a vague trouble in her voice and eyes.
+      &ldquo;Perhaps I haven't understood her exactly. Perhaps&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0028" id="link2H_4_0028">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXVI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;the last long
+      evening we passed together&mdash;she said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What would you like to have me do with this house while we are gone?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do with this house?&rdquo; I echoed; and I felt as if I were standing on the
+      edge of an abyss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; shall we let it, or sell it&mdash;or what? Or give it away?&rdquo; I drew
+      a little breath at this; perhaps we had not misunderstood each other,
+      after all. She went on: &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By all means, give it away,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed at this, as if she thought I must be joking. &ldquo;It would be
+      droll, wouldn't it, to have Tammany appointees teaching Altrurianism?&rdquo;
+       Then she said, after a moment of reflection: &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I began: &ldquo;You can give <i>all</i> your money to it, my dear&mdash;&rdquo; But I
+      stopped at the bewildered look she turned on me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All?&rdquo; she repeated. &ldquo;But what should we have to live on, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We shall need no money to live on in Altruria,&rdquo; I answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, in Altruria! But when we come back to New York?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an agonizing moment, and I felt that shutting of the heart which
+      blinds the eyes and makes the brain reel. &ldquo;Eveleth,&rdquo; I gasped, &ldquo;did you
+      expect to return to New York?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, certainly!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;Not at once, of course. But after you had
+      seen your friends, and made a good, long visit&mdash;Why, surely,
+      Aristide, you don't understand that I&mdash;You didn't mean to <i>live</i>
+      in Altruria?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; I answered. &ldquo;Where else could I live? Did you think for an instant
+      that I could live in such a land as this?&rdquo; I saw that she was hurt, and I
+      hastened to say: &ldquo;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, <i>our</i> country, will never consent to
+      live in any other.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I know it must be very beautiful; but I hadn't supposed&mdash;and
+      yet I ought&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, indeed!&rdquo; she answered, generously. &ldquo;If you are to be my husband,&rdquo; and
+      here she began with the solemn words of the Bible, so beautiful in their
+      quaint English, &ldquo;'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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when we met again I could see that she had been thinking seriously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I won't give the house absolutely away,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;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&mdash;I won't give the whole house to the school&mdash;and
+      we will lecture on the later phases of Altrurian life to the pupils. How
+      will that do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll endow it,&rdquo; she went on, &ldquo;and I'll leave the rest of my money at
+      interest here; unless you think that some Altrurian securities&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; there are no such things!&rdquo; I cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was what I thought,&rdquo; she returned; &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something handsome!&rdquo; I cried. &ldquo;But, Eveleth, haven't I heard you say
+      yourself that the growth of interest from dead money was like&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes; that!&rdquo; she returned. &ldquo;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 <i>duty</i> to take the interest. How
+      should we keep up the school, and pay the teachers, and everything?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not <i>my</i> money, Eveleth!&rdquo; I entreated. &ldquo;Don't say <i>my</i> money!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But whatever is mine is yours,&rdquo; she returned, with a wounded air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She dropped upon my knee as she spoke, laughing, and put her hand under my
+      chin, to lift my fallen face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now you mustn't be a goose, Aristide, even if you <i>are</i> an angel!
+      Now listen. You <i>know</i>, don't you, that I hate money just as badly as
+      you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have made me think so, Eveleth,&rdquo; I answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You could destroy it,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not unless you were a crank,&rdquo; she returned. &ldquo;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,&rdquo; and she accented this confession
+      with a laugh that was also a kiss. &ldquo;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 <i>have</i> to do it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He doesn't do it willingly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. And <i>we</i> won't. And after a while&mdash;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No more than you could take it to heaven with you,&rdquo; I answered, solemnly;
+      but she would not let me be altogether serious about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;and&mdash;really
+      do some good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0029" id="link2H_4_0029">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXVII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I rose in a distress which I could not hide. &ldquo;Oh, Eveleth, Eveleth!&rdquo; I
+      cried. &ldquo;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&mdash;no, not me&mdash;but between love
+      and your money. You cannot keep both.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had stood listening to me; now she cast herself on my heart and
+      stopped my words with an impassioned kiss. &ldquo;Then there is no choice for
+      me. My choice is made, once for all.&rdquo; She set her hands against my breast
+      and pushed me from her. &ldquo;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&mdash;you
+      wish it, don't you?&mdash;and because I will not let you ever think I
+      acted upon an impulse, and that I regretted it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is right, Eveleth. That is like <i>you</i>&rdquo; I said, and I took her
+      into my arms for good-night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>&ldquo;You will believe that I have not slept, when you read this. </i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have thought it all over again, as you wished, and it is all over
+      between us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am what you said, the creature of my environment. I cannot detach
+      myself from it; I cannot escape from what I have been.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is no use writing; if I kept on forever, it would always be the
+      same cry of shame, of love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eveleth Strange.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have yet two days before me until the steamer sails; we were to have
+      sailed together, and now I shall sail alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was she, then, the <i>poseuse</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I shall soon see you again; and, until then, farewell.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      END OF PART I
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PART2" id="link2H_PART2">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART SECOND
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0031" id="link2H_4_0031">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;open&rdquo; Altruria, as
+      Commodore Perry &ldquo;opened&rdquo; 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 you suppose; you do not hear of them afterwards,
+      because their crews are poor, ignorant people, whose stories of their
+      adventures are always distrusted, and who know they would be laughed at if
+      they told the stories they could of a country like Altruria. My husband
+      himself took one of their vessels on her home voyage when he came to us,
+      catching the Australasian steamer at New Zealand; and now I am writing you
+      by the same sort of opportunity. I shall have time enough to write you a
+      longer letter than you will care to read; the ship does not sail for a
+      week yet, because it is so hard to get her crew together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now that I have actually made a beginning, my mind goes back so strongly
+      to that terrible night when I came to you after Aristides (I always use
+      the English form of his name now) left New York that I seem to be living
+      the tragedy over again, and this happiness of mine here is like a dream
+      which I cannot trust. It was not all tragedy, though, and I remember how
+      funny Mr. Makely was, trying to keep his face straight when the whole
+      truth had to come out, and I confessed that I had expected, without really
+      knowing it myself, that Aristides would disregard that wicked note I had
+      written him and come and make me marry him, not against my will, but
+      against my word. Of course I didn't put it in just that way, but in a way
+      to let you both guess it. The first glimmering of hope that I had was when
+      Mr. Makely said, &ldquo;Then, when a woman tells a man that all is over between
+      them forever, she means that she would like to discuss the business with
+      him?&rdquo; I was old enough to be ashamed, but it seemed to me that you and I
+      had gone back in that awful moment and were two girls together, just as we
+      used to be at school. I was proud of the way you stood up for me, because
+      I thought that if you could tolerate me after what I had confessed I could
+      not be quite a fool. I knew that I deserved at least some pity, and though
+      I laughed with Mr. Makely, I was glad of your indignation with him, and of
+      your faith in Aristides. When it came to the question of what I should do,
+      I don't know which of you I owed the most to. It was a kind of comfort to
+      have Mr. Makely acknowledge that though he regarded Aristides as a myth,
+      still he believed that he was a thoroughly <i>good</i> myth, and couldn't
+      tell a lie if he wanted to; and I loved you, and shall love you more than
+      any one else but him, for saying that Aristides was the most real man you
+      had ever met, and that if everything he said was untrue you would trust
+      him to the end of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, Dolly, it wasn't all comedy, any more than it was all tragedy, and
+      when you and I had laughed and cried ourselves to the point where there
+      was nothing for me to do but to take the next boat for Liverpool, and Mr.
+      Makely had agreed to look after the tickets and cable Aristides that I was
+      coming, there was still my poor, dear mother to deal with. There is no use
+      trying to conceal from you that she was always opposed to my husband. She
+      thought there was something uncanny about him, though she felt as we did
+      that there was nothing uncanny <i>in</i> him; but a man who pretended to
+      come from a country where there was no riches and no poverty could not be
+      trusted with any woman's happiness; and though she could not help loving
+      him, she thought I ought to tear him out of my heart, and if I could not
+      do that I ought to have myself shut up in an asylum. We had a dreadful
+      time when I told her what I had decided to do, and I was almost frantic.
+      At last, when she saw that I was determined to follow him, she yielded,
+      not because she was convinced, but because she could not give me up; I
+      wouldn't have let her if she could. I believe that the only thing which
+      reconciled her was that you and Mr. Makely believed in him, and thought I
+      had better do what I wanted to, if nothing could keep me from it. I shall
+      never, never forget Mr. Makely's goodness in coming to talk with her, and
+      how skillfully he managed, without committing himself to Altruria, to
+      declare his faith in my Altrurian. Even then she was troubled about what
+      she thought the indelicacy of my behavior in following him across the sea,
+      and she had all sorts of doubts as to how he would receive me when we met
+      in Liverpool. It wasn't very reasonable of me to say that if he cast me
+      off I should still love him more than any other human being, and his
+      censure would be more precious to me than the praise of the rest of the
+      world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose I hardly knew what I was saying, but when once I had yielded to
+      my love for him there was nothing else in life. I could not have left my
+      mother behind, but in her opposition to me she seemed like an enemy, and I
+      should somehow have <i>forced</i> her to go if she had not yielded. When
+      she did yield, she yielded with her whole heart and soul, and so far from
+      hindering me in my preparations for the voyage, I do not believe I could
+      have got off without her. She thought about everything, and it was her
+      idea to leave my business affairs entirely in Mr. Makely's hands, and to
+      trust the future for the final disposition of my property. I did not care
+      for it myself; I hated it, because it was that which had stood between me
+      and Aristides; but she foresaw that if by any wild impossibility he should
+      reject me when we met, I should need it for the life I must go back to in
+      New York. She behaved like a martyr as well as a heroine, for till we
+      reached Altruria she was a continual sacrifice to me. She stubbornly
+      doubted the whole affair, but now I must do her the justice to say that
+      she has been convinced by the fact. The best she can say of it is that it
+      is like the world of her girlhood; and she has gone back to the simple
+      life here from the artificial life in New York, with the joy of a child.
+      She works the whole day, and she would play if she had ever learned how.
+      She is a better Altrurian than I am; if there could be a bigoted Altrurian
+      my mother would be one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0032" id="link2H_4_0032">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I sent you a short letter from Liverpool, saying that by the unprecedented
+      delays of the <i>Urania</i>, which I had taken because it was the swiftest
+      boat of the Neptune line, we had failed to pass the old, ten-day,
+      single-screw Galaxy liner which Aristides had sailed in. I had only time
+      for a word to you; but a million words could not have told the agonies I
+      suffered, and when I overtook him on board the Orient Pacific steamer at
+      Plymouth, where she touched, I could just scribble off the cable sent Mr.
+      Makely before our steamer put off again. I am afraid you did not find my
+      cable very expressive, but I was glad that I did not try to say more, for
+      if I had tried I should simply have gibbered, at a shilling a gibber. I
+      expected to make amends by a whole volume of letters, and I did post a
+      dozen under one cover from Colombo. If they never reached you I am very
+      sorry, for now it is impossible to take up the threads of that time and
+      weave them into any sort of connected pattern. You will have to let me off
+      with saying that Aristides was everything that I believed he would be and
+      was never really afraid he might not be. From the moment we caught sight
+      of each other at Plymouth, he at the rail of the steamer and I on the deck
+      of the tender, we were as completely one as we are now. I never could tell
+      how I got aboard to him; whether he came down and brought me, or whether I
+      was simply rapt through the air to his side. It would have been
+      embarrassing if we had not treated the situation frankly; but such odd
+      things happen among the English going out to their different colonies that
+      our marriage, by a missionary returning to his station, was not even a
+      nine days' wonder with our fellow-passengers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were a good deal more than nine days on the steamer before we could get
+      a vessel that would take us on to Altruria; but we overhauled a ship going
+      there for provisions at last, and we were all put off on her, bag and
+      baggage, with three cheers from the friends we were leaving; I think they
+      thought we were going to some of the British islands that the Pacific is
+      full of. I had been thankful from the first that I had not brought a maid,
+      knowing the Altrurian prejudice against hireling service, but I never was
+      so glad as I was when we got aboard that vessel, for when the captain's
+      wife, who was with him, found that I had no one to look after me, she
+      looked after me herself, just for the fun of it, she said; but <i>I</i>
+      knew it was the love of it. It was a sort of general trading-ship,
+      stopping at the different islands in the South Seas, and had been a year
+      out from home, where the kind woman had left her little ones; she cried
+      over their photographs to me. Her husband had been in Altruria before, and
+      he and Aristides were old acquaintances and met like brothers; some of the
+      crew knew him, too, and the captain relaxed discipline so far as to let us
+      shake hands with the second-mate as the men's representative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I needn't dwell on the incidents of our home-coming&mdash;for that was
+      what it seemed for my mother and me as well as for my husband&mdash;but I
+      must give you one detail of our reception, for I still think it almost the
+      prettiest thing that has happened to us among the millions of pretty
+      things. Aristides had written home of our engagement, and he was expected
+      with his American wife; and before we came to anchor the captain ran up
+      the Emissary's signal, which my husband gave him, and then three boats
+      left the shore and pulled rapidly out to us. As they came nearer I saw the
+      first Altrurian costumes in the lovely colors that the people wear here,
+      and that make a group of them look like a flower-bed; and then I saw that
+      the boats were banked with flowers along the gunwales from stem to stern,
+      and that they were each not <i>manned,</i> but <i>girled</i> by six
+      rowers, who pulled as true a stroke as I ever saw in our boat-races. When
+      they caught sight of us, leaning over the side, and Aristides lifted his
+      hat and waved it to them, they all stood their oars upright, and burst
+      into a kind of welcome song: I had been dreading one of those stupid,
+      banging salutes of ten or twenty guns, and you can imagine what a relief
+      it was. They were great, splendid creatures, as tall as our millionaires'
+      tallest daughters, and as strong-looking as any of our college-girl
+      athletes; and when we got down over the ship's side, and Aristides said a
+      few words of introduction for my mother and me, as we stepped into the
+      largest of the boats, I thought they would crush me, catching me in their
+      strong, brown arms, and kissing me on each cheek; they never kiss on the
+      mouth in Altruria. The girls in the other boats kissed their hands to
+      mother and me, and shouted to Aristides, and then, when our boat set out
+      for the shore, they got on each side of us and sang song after song as
+      they pulled even stroke with our crew. Half-way, we met three other boats,
+      really <i>manned,</i> these ones, and going out to get our baggage, and
+      then you ought to have heard the shouting and laughing, that ended in more
+      singing, when the young fellows' voices mixed with the girls, till they
+      were lost in the welcome that came off to us from the crowded quay, where
+      I should have thought half Altruria had gathered to receive us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was afraid it was going to be too much for my mother, but she stood it
+      bravely; and almost at a glance people began to take her into
+      consideration, and she was delivered over to two young married ladies, who
+      saw that she was made comfortable, the first of any, in the pretty
+      Regionic guest-house where they put us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wish I could give you a notion of that guest-house, with its cool, quiet
+      rooms, and its lawned and gardened enclosure, and a little fountain
+      purring away among the flowers! But what astonished me was that there were
+      no sort of carriages, or wheeled conveyances, which, after our escort from
+      the ship, I thought might very well have met the returning Emissary and
+      his wife. They made my mother get into a litter, with soft cushions and
+      with lilac curtains blowing round it, and six girls carried her up to the
+      house; but they seemed not to imagine my not walking, and, in fact, I
+      could hardly have imagined it myself, after the first moment of queerness.
+      That walk was full of such rich experience for every one of the senses
+      that I would not have missed a step of it; but as soon as I could get
+      Aristides alone I asked him about horses, and he said that though horses
+      were still used in farm work, not a horse was allowed in any city or
+      village of Altruria, because of their filthiness. As for public vehicles,
+      they used to have electric trolleys; in the year that he had been absent
+      they had substituted electric motors; but these were not running, because
+      it was a holiday on which we had happened to arrive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was another incident of my first day which I think will amuse you,
+      knowing how I have always shrunk from any sort of public appearances. When
+      Aristides went to make his report to the people assembled in a sort of
+      convention, I had to go too, and take part in the proceedings; for women
+      are on an entire equality with the men here, and people would be shocked
+      if husband and wife were separated in their public life. They did not
+      spare me a single thing. Where Aristides was not very clear, or rather not
+      full enough, in describing America, I was called on to supplement, and I
+      had to make several speeches. Of course, as I spoke in English, he had to
+      put it into Altrurian for me, and it made the greatest excitement. The
+      Altrurians are very lively people, and as full of the desire to hear some
+      new things as Paul said the men of Athens were. At times they were in a
+      perfect gale of laughter at what we told them about America. Afterwards
+      some of the women confessed to me that they liked to hear us speaking
+      English together; it sounded like the whistling of birds or the shrilling
+      of locusts. But they were perfectly kind, and though they laughed it was
+      clear that they laughed at what we were saying, and never at us, or at
+      least never at <i>me</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course there was the greatest curiosity to know what Aristides' wife
+      looked like, as well as sounded like; he had written out about our
+      engagement before I broke it; and my clothes were of as much interest As
+      myself, or more. You know how I had purposely left my latest Paris things
+      behind, so as to come as simply as possible to the simple life of
+      Altruria, but still with my big leg-of-mutton sleeves, and my picture-hat,
+      and my pinched waist, I felt perfectly grotesque, and I have no doubt I
+      looked it. They had never seen a lady from the capitalistic world before,
+      but only now and then a whaling-captain's wife who had come ashore; and I
+      knew they were burning to examine my smart clothes down to the last button
+      and bit of braid. I had on the short skirts of last year, and I could feel
+      ten thousand eyes fastened on my high-heeled boots, which you know <i>I</i>
+      never went to extremes in. I confess my face burned a little, to realize
+      what a scarecrow I must look, when I glanced round at those Altrurian
+      women, whose pretty, classic fashions made the whole place like a field of
+      lilacs and irises, and knew that they were as comfortable as they were
+      beautiful. Do you remember some of the descriptions of the undergraduate
+      maidens in the &ldquo;Princess&rdquo;&mdash;I know you had it at school&mdash;where
+      they are sitting in the palace halls together? The effect was something
+      like that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You may be sure that I got out of my things as soon as I could borrow an
+      Altrurian costume, and now my Paris confections are already hung up for
+      monuments, as Richard III. says, in the Capitalistic Museum, where people
+      from the outlying Regions may come and study them as object-lessons in
+      what not to wear. (You remember what you said Aristides told you, when he
+      spoke that day at the mountains, about the Regions that Altruria is
+      divided into? This is the Maritime Region, and the city where we are
+      living for the present is the capital.) You may think this was rather hard
+      on me, and at first it did seem pretty intimate, having my things in a
+      long glass case, and it gave me a shock to see them, as if it had been my
+      ghost, whenever I passed them. But the fact is I was more ashamed than
+      hurt&mdash;they were so ugly and stupid and useless. I could have borne my
+      Paris dress and my picture-hat if it had not been for those ridiculous
+      high-heeled, pointed-toe shoes, which the Curatress had stood at the
+      bottom of the skirts. They looked the most frantic things you can imagine,
+      and the mere sight of them made my poor feet <i>ache</i> in the beautiful
+      sandals I am wearing now; when once you have put on sandals you say
+      good-bye and good-riddance to shoes. In a single month my feet have grown
+      almost a tenth as large again as they were, and my friends here encourage
+      me to believe that they will yet measure nearly the classic size, though,
+      as you know, I am not in my first youth and can't expect them to do
+      miracles.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      I had to leave off abruptly at the last page because Aristides had come in
+      with a piece of news that took my mind off everything else. I am afraid
+      you are not going to get this letter even at the late date I had set for
+      its reaching you, my dear. It seems that there has been a sort of mutiny
+      among the crew of our trader, which was to sail next week, and now there
+      is no telling when she will sail. Ever since she came the men have been
+      allowed their liberty, as they call it, by watches, but the last watch
+      came ashore this week before another watch had returned to the ship, and
+      now not one of the sailors will go back. They had been exploring the
+      country by turns, at their leisure, it seems, and their excuse is that
+      they like Altruria better than America, which they say they wish never to
+      see again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You know (though I didn't, till Aristides explained to me) that in any
+      European country the captain in such a case would go to his consul, and
+      the consul would go to the police, and the police would run the men down
+      and send them back to the ship in irons as deserters, or put them in jail
+      till the captain was ready to sail, and then deliver them up to him. But
+      it seems that there is no law in Altruria to do anything of the kind; the
+      only law here that would touch the case is one which obliges any citizen
+      to appear and answer the complaint of any other citizen before the
+      Justiciary Assembly. A citizen cannot be imprisoned for anything but the
+      rarest offence, like killing a person in a fit of passion; and as to
+      seizing upon men who are guilty of nothing worse than wanting to be left
+      to the pursuit of happiness, as all the Altrurians are, there is no
+      statute and no usage for it. Aristides says that the only thing which can
+      be done is to ask the captain and the men to come to the Assembly and each
+      state his case. The Altrurians are not anxious to have the men stay, not
+      merely because they are coarse, rude, or vicious, but because they think
+      they ought to go home and tell the Americans what they have seen and heard
+      here, and try and get them to found an Altrurian Commonwealth of their
+      own. Still they will not compel them to go, and the magistrates do not
+      wish to rouse any sort of sentiment against them. They feel that the men
+      are standing on their natural rights, which they could not abdicate if
+      they would. I know this will appear perfectly ridiculous to Mr. Makely,
+      and I confess myself that there seems something binding in a contract
+      which ought to act on the men's consciences, at least.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0033" id="link2H_4_0033">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Well, my dear Dorothea, the hearing before the Assembly is over, and it
+      has left us just where it found us, as far as the departure of our trader
+      is concerned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How I wish you could have been there! The hearing lasted three days, and I
+      would not have missed a minute of it. As it was, I did not miss a
+      syllable, and it was so deeply printed on my mind that I believe I could
+      repeat it word for word if I had to. But, in the first place, I must try
+      and realize the scene to you. I was once summoned as a witness in one of
+      our courts, you remember, and I have never forgotten the horror of it: the
+      hot, dirty room, with its foul air, the brutal spectators, the policemen
+      stationed among them to keep them in order, the lawyers with the plaintiff
+      and defendant seated all at one table, the uncouth abruptness of the
+      clerks and janitors, or whatever, the undignified magistrate, who looked
+      as if his lunch had made him drowsy, and who seemed half asleep, as he
+      slouched in his arm-chair behind his desk. Instead of such a setting as
+      this, you must imagine a vast marble amphitheatre, larger than the
+      Metropolitan Opera, by three or four times, all the gradines overflowing
+      (that is the word for the &ldquo;liquefaction of the clothes&rdquo; which poured over
+      them), and looking like those Bermudan waters where the colors of the
+      rainbow seem dropped around the coast. On the platform, or stage, sat the
+      Presidents of the Assembly, and on a tier of seats behind and above them,
+      the national Magistrates, who, as this is the capital of the republic for
+      the time being, had decided to be present at the hearing, because they
+      thought the case so very important. In the hollow space, just below (like
+      that where you remember the Chorus stood in that Greek play which we saw
+      at Harvard ages ago), were the captain and the first-mate on one hand, and
+      the seamen on the other; the second-mate, our particular friend, was not
+      there because he never goes ashore anywhere, and had chosen to remain with
+      the black cook in charge of the ship. The captain's wife would rather have
+      stayed with them, but I persuaded her to come to us for the days of the
+      hearing, because the captain had somehow thought we were opposed to him,
+      and because I thought she ought to be there to encourage him by her
+      presence. She sat next to me, in a hat which I wish you could have seen,
+      Dolly, and a dress which would have set your teeth on edge; but inside of
+      them I knew she was one of the best souls in the world, and I loved her
+      the more for being the sight she was among those wonderful Altrurian
+      women.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The weather was perfect, as it nearly always is at this time of year&mdash;warm,
+      yet fresh, with a sky of that &ldquo;bleu impossible&rdquo; of the Riviera on the
+      clearest day. Some people had parasols, but they put them down as soon as
+      the hearing began, and everybody could see perfectly. You would have
+      thought they could not hear so well, but a sort of immense sounding-plane
+      was curved behind the stage, so that not a word of the testimony on either
+      side was lost to me in English. The Altrurian translation was given the
+      second day of the hearing through a megaphone, as different in tone from
+      the thing that the man in the Grand Central Station bellows the trains
+      through as the <i>vox-humana</i> stop of an organ is different from the
+      fog-horn of a light-house. The captain's wife was bashful, in her odd
+      American dress, but we had got seats near the tribune, rather out of
+      sight, and there was nothing to hinder our hearing, like the <i>frou-frou</i>
+      of stiff silks or starched skirts (which I am afraid we poor things in
+      America like to make when we move) from the soft, filmy tissues that the
+      Altrurian women wear; but I must confess that there was a good deal of
+      whispering while the captain and the men were telling their stories. But,
+      no one except the interpreters, who were taking their testimony down in
+      short-hand, to be translated into Altrurian and read at the subsequent
+      hearing, could understand what they were saying, and so nobody was
+      disturbed by the murmurs. The whispering was mostly near me, where I sat
+      with the captain's wife, for everybody I knew got as close as they could
+      and studied my face when they thought anything important or significant
+      had been said. They are very quick at reading faces here; in fact, a great
+      deal of the conversation is carried on in that way, or with the visible
+      speech; and my Altrurian friends knew almost as well as I did when the
+      speakers came to an interesting point. It was rather embarrassing for me,
+      though, with the poor captain's wife at my side, to tell them, in my
+      broken Altrurian, what the men were accusing the captain of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I talk of the men, but it was really only one of them who at first, by
+      their common consent, spoke for the rest. He was a middle-aged Yankee, and
+      almost the only born American among them, for you know that our sailors,
+      nowadays, are of every nationality under the sun&mdash;Portuguese,
+      Norwegians, Greeks, Italians, Kanucks, and Kanakas, and even Cape Cod
+      Indians. He said he guessed his story was the story of most sailors, and
+      he had followed the sea his whole life. His story was dreadful, and I
+      tried to persuade the captain's wife not to come to the hearing the next
+      day, when it was to be read in Altrurian; but she would come. I was afraid
+      she would be overwhelmed by the public compassion, and would not know what
+      to do; for when something awful that the sailor had said against the
+      captain was translated the women, all about us cooed their sympathy with
+      her, and pressed her hand if they could, or patted her on the shoulder, to
+      show how much they pitied her. In Altruria they pity the friends of those
+      who have done wrong, and sometimes even the wrong-doers themselves; and it
+      is quite a luxury, for there is so little wrong-doing here: I tell them
+      that in America they would have as much pitying to do as they could
+      possibly ask. After the hearing that day my friends, who were of a good
+      many different Refectories, as we call them here, wanted her to go and
+      lunch with them; but I got her quietly home with me, and after she had had
+      something to eat I made her lie down awhile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You won't care to have me go fully into the affair. The sailors' spokesman
+      told how he had been born on a farm, where he had shared the family
+      drudgery and poverty till he grew old enough to run away. He meant to go
+      to sea, but he went first to a factory town and worked three or four years
+      in the mills. He never went back to the farm, but he sent a little money
+      now and then to his mother; and he stayed on till he got into trouble. He
+      did not say just what kind of trouble, but I fancied it was some sort of
+      love-trouble; he blamed himself for it; and when he left that town to get
+      away from the thought of it, as much as anything, and went to work in
+      another town, he took to drink; then, once, in a drunken spree, he found
+      himself in New York without knowing how. But it was in what he called a
+      sailors' boarding-house, and one morning, after he had been drinking
+      overnight &ldquo;with a very pleasant gentleman,&rdquo; he found himself in the
+      forecastle of a ship bound for Holland, and when the mate came and cursed
+      him up and cursed him out he found himself in the foretop. I give it
+      partly in his own language, because I cannot help it; and I only wish I
+      could give it wholly in his language; it was so graphic and so full of
+      queer Yankee humor. From that time on, he said, he had followed the sea;
+      and at sea he was always a good temperance man, but Altruria was the only
+      place he had ever kept sober ashore. He guessed that was partly because
+      there was nothing to drink but unfermented grape-juice, and partly because
+      there was nobody to drink with; anyhow, he had not had a drop here.
+      Everywhere else, as soon as he left his ship, he made for a sailors'
+      boarding-house, and then he did not know much till he found himself aboard
+      ship and bound for somewhere that he did not know of. He was always, he
+      said, a stolen man, as much as a negro captured on the west coast of
+      Africa and sold to a slaver; and, he said, it was a slave's life he led
+      between drinks, whether it was a long time or short. He said he would ask
+      his mates if it was very different with them, and when he turned to them
+      they all shouted back, in their various kinds of foreign accents, No, it
+      was just the same with them, every one. Then he said that was how he came
+      to ship on our captain's vessel, and though they could not all say the
+      same, they nodded confirmation as far as he was concerned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The captain looked sheepish enough at this, but he looked sorrowful, too,
+      as if he could have wished it had been different, and he asked the man if
+      he had been abused since he came on board. Well, the man said, not unless
+      you called tainted salt-horse and weevilly biscuit abuse; and then the
+      captain sat down again, and I could feel his poor wife shrinking beside
+      me. The man said that he was comparatively well off on the captain's ship,
+      and the life was not half such a dog's life as he had led on other
+      vessels; but it was such that when he got ashore here in Altruria, and saw
+      how <i>white</i> people lived, people that <i>used</i> each other white,
+      he made up his mind that he would never go hack to any ship alive. He
+      hated a ship so much that if he could go home to America as a first-class
+      passenger on a Cunard liner, John D. Rockefeller would not have money
+      enough to hire him to do it. He was going to stay in Altruria till he
+      died, if they would let him, and he guessed they would, if what he had
+      heard about them was true. He just wanted, he said, while we were about
+      it, to have a few of his mates tell their experience, not so much on board
+      the <i>Little Sally</i>, but on shore, and since they could remember; and
+      one after another did get up and tell their miserable stories. They were
+      like the stories you sometimes read in your paper over your coffee, or
+      that you can hear any time you go into the congested districts in New
+      York; but I assure you, my dear, they seemed to me perfectly incredible
+      here, though I had known hundreds of such stories at home. As I realized
+      their facts I forgot where I was; I felt that I was back again in that
+      horror, where it sometimes seemed to me I had no right to be fed or
+      clothed or warm or clean in the midst of the hunger and cold and nakedness
+      and dirt, and where I could only reconcile myself to my comfort because I
+      knew my discomfort would not help others' misery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I can hardly tell how, but even the first day a sense of something
+      terrible spread through that multitude of people, to whom the words
+      themselves were mere empty sounds. The captain sat through it, with his
+      head drooping, till his face was out of sight, and the tears ran silently
+      down his wife's cheeks; and the women round me were somehow awed into
+      silence. When the men ended, and there seemed to be no one else to say
+      anything on that side, the captain jumped to his feet, with a sort of
+      ferocious energy, and shouted out, &ldquo;Are you all through, men?&rdquo; and their
+      spokesman answered, &ldquo;Ay, ay, sir!&rdquo; and then the captain flung back his
+      grizzled hair and shook his fist towards the sailors. &ldquo;And do you think I
+      <i>wanted</i> to do it? Do you think I <i>liked</i> to do it? Do you think
+      that if I hadn't been <i>afraid</i> my whole life long I would have had
+      the <i>heart</i> to lead you the dog's life I know I've led you? I've been
+      as poor as the poorest of you, and as low down as the lowest; I was born
+      in the town poor-house, and I've been so afraid of the poor-house all my
+      days that I hain't had, as you may say, a minute's peace. Ask my wife,
+      there, what sort of a man I <i>am</i>, and whether I'm the man, <i>really</i>
+      the man that's been hard and mean to you the way I know I been. It was
+      because I was <i>afraid</i>, and because a coward is always hard and mean.
+      I been afraid, ever since I could remember anything, of coming to want,
+      and I was willing to see other men suffer so I could make sure that me and
+      mine shouldn't suffer. That's the way we do at home, ain't it? That's in
+      the day's work, ain't it? That's playing the game, ain't it, for
+      everybody? You can't say it ain't.&rdquo; He stopped, and the men's spokesman
+      called back, &ldquo;Ay, ay, sir,&rdquo; as he had done before, and as I had often
+      heard the men do when given an order on the ship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The captain gave a kind of sobbing laugh, and went on in a lower tone.
+      &ldquo;Well, I know you ain't going back. I guess I didn't expect it much from
+      the start, and I guess I'm not surprised.&rdquo; Then he lifted his head and
+      shouted, &ldquo;And do you suppose <i>I</i> want to go back? Don't you suppose
+      <i>I</i> would like to spend the rest of my days, too, among <i>white</i>
+      people, people that <i>use</i> each other white, as you say, and where
+      there ain't any want or, what's worse, <i>fear</i> of want? Men! There
+      ain't a day, or an hour, or a minute, when I don't think how awful it is
+      over there, where I got to be either some man's slave or some man's
+      master, as much so as if it was down in the ship's articles. My wife ain't
+      so, because she ain't been ashore here. I wouldn't let her; I was afraid
+      to let her see what a white man's country really was, because I felt so
+      weak about it myself, and I didn't want to put the trial on her, too. And
+      do you know <i>why</i> we're going back, or want to go? I guess some of
+      you know, but I want to tell these folks here so they'll understand, and I
+      want you, Mr. Homos,&rdquo; he called to my husband, &ldquo;to get it down straight.
+      It's because we've got two little children over there, that we left with
+      their grandmother when my wife come with me this voyage because she had
+      lung difficulty and wanted to see whether she could get her health back.
+      Nothing else on God's green earth could take me back to America, and I
+      guess it couldn't my wife if she knew what Altruria was as well as I do.
+      But when I went around here and saw how everything was, and remembered how
+      it was at home, I just said, 'She'll stay on the ship.' Now, that's all I
+      got to say, though I thought I had a lot more. I guess it'll be enough for
+      these folks, and they can judge between us.&rdquo; Then the captain sat down,
+      and to make a long story short, the facts of the hearing were repeated in
+      Altrurian the next day by megaphone, and when the translation was finished
+      there was a general rush for the captain. He plainly expected to be
+      lynched, and his wife screamed out, &ldquo;Oh, don't hurt him! He isn't a bad
+      man!&rdquo; But it was only the Altrurian way with a guilty person: they wanted
+      to let him know how sorry they were for him, and since his sin had found
+      him out how hopeful they were for his redemption. I had to explain it to
+      the sailors as well as to the captain and his wife, but I don't believe
+      any of them quite accepted the fact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The third day of the hearing was for the rendering of the decision, first
+      in Altrurian, and then in English. The verdict of the magistrates had to
+      be confirmed by a standing vote of the people, and of course the women
+      voted as well as the men. The decision was that the sailors should be
+      absolutely free to go or stay, but they took into account the fact that it
+      would be cruel to keep the captain and his wife away from their little
+      ones, and the sailors might wish to consider this. If they still remained
+      true to their love of Altruria they could find some means of returning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the translator came to this point their spokesman jumped to his feet
+      and called out to the captain, &ldquo;Will you <i>do</i> it?&rdquo; &ldquo;Do what?&rdquo; he
+      asked, getting slowly to his own feet. &ldquo;Come back with us after you have
+      seen the kids?&rdquo; The captain shook his fist at the sailors; it seemed to be
+      the only gesture he had with them. &ldquo;Give me the <i>chance!</i> All I want
+      is to see the children and bring them out with me to Altruria, and the old
+      folks with them.&rdquo; &ldquo;Will you <i>swear</i> it? Will you say, 'I hope I may
+      find the kids dead and buried when I get home if I don't do it'?&rdquo; &ldquo;I'll
+      take that oath, or any oath you want me to.&rdquo; &ldquo;Shake hands on it, then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two men met in front of the tribunal and clasped hands there, and
+      their reconciliation did not need translation. Such a roar of cheers went
+      up! And then the whole assembly burst out in the national Altrurian
+      anthem, &ldquo;Brothers All.&rdquo; I wish you could have heard it! But when the terms
+      of the agreement were explained, the cheering that had gone before was a
+      mere whisper to what followed. One orator after another rose and praised
+      the self-sacrifice of the sailors. I was the proudest when the last of
+      them referred to Aristides and the reports which he had sent home from
+      America, and said that without some such study as he had made of the
+      American character they never could have understood such an act as they
+      were now witnessing. Illogical and insensate as their system was, their
+      character sometimes had a beauty, a sublimity which was not possible to
+      Altrurians even, for it was performed in the face of risks and chances
+      which their happy conditions relieved them from. At the same time, the
+      orator wished his hearers to consider the essential immorality of the act.
+      He said that civilized men had no right to take these risks and chances.
+      The sailors were perhaps justified, in so far as they were homeless,
+      wifeless, and childless men; but it must not be forgotten that their
+      heroism was like the reckless generosity of savages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The men have gone back to the ship, and she sails this afternoon. I have
+      persuaded the captain to let his wife stay to lunch with me at our
+      Refectory, where the ladies wish to bid her good-bye, and I am hurrying
+      forward this letter so that she can take it on board with her this
+      afternoon. She has promised to post it on the first Pacific steamer they
+      meet, or if they do not meet any to send it forward to you with a
+      special-delivery stamp as soon as they reach Boston. She will also forward
+      by express an Altrurian costume, such as I am now wearing, sandals and
+      all! Do put it on, Dolly, dear, for my sake, and realize what it is for
+      once in your life to be a <i>free</i> woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heaven knows when I shall have another chance of getting letters to you.
+      But I shall live in hopes, and I shall set down my experiences here for
+      your benefit, not perhaps as I meet them, but as I think of them, and you
+      must not mind having a rather cluttered narrative. To-morrow we are
+      setting off on our round of the capitals, where Aristides is to make a
+      sort of public report to the people of the different Regions on the
+      working of the capitalistic conditions as he observed them among us. But I
+      don't expect to send you a continuous narrative of our adventures.
+      Good-bye, dearest, with my mother's love, and my husband's as well as my
+      own, to both of you; think of me as needing nothing but a glimpse of you
+      to complete my happiness. How I should like to tell you fully about it!
+      You <i>must</i> come to Altruria!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I came near letting this go without telling you of one curious incident of
+      the affair between the captain and his men. Before the men returned to the
+      ship they came with their spokesman to say good-bye to Aristides and me,
+      and he remarked casually that it was just as well, maybe, to be going
+      back, because, for one thing, they would know then whether it was real or
+      not. I asked him what he meant, and he said, &ldquo;Well, you know, some of the
+      mates think it's a dream here, or it's too good to be true. As far forth
+      as I go, I'd be willing to have it a dream that I didn't ever have to wake
+      up from. It ain't any too good to be true for me. Anyway, I'm going to get
+      back somehow, and give it another chance to be a fact.&rdquo; Wasn't that
+      charming? It had a real touch of poetry in it, but it was prose that
+      followed. I couldn't help asking him whether there had been nothing to mar
+      the pleasure of their stay in Altruria, and he answered: &ldquo;Well, I don't
+      know as you could rightly say <i>mar;</i> it hadn't ought to have. You
+      see, it was like this. You see, some of the mates wanted to lay off and
+      have a regular bange, but that don't seem to be the idea here. After we
+      had been ashore a day or two they set us to work at different jobs, or
+      wanted to. The mates didn't take hold very lively, and some of 'em didn't
+      take hold a bit. But after that went on a couple of days, there wa'n't any
+      breakfast one morning, and come noontime there wa'n't any dinner, and as
+      far forth as they could make out they had to go to bed without supper.
+      Then they called a halt, and tackled one of your head men here that could
+      speak some English. He didn't answer them right off the reel, but he got
+      out his English Testament and he read 'em a verse that said, 'For even
+      when we were with you this we commanded you, that if any one would not
+      work neither should he eat.' That kind of fetched 'em, and after that
+      there wa'n't any sojerin', well not to speak of. They saw he meant
+      business. I guess it did more than any one thing to make 'em think they
+      wa'n't dreamin'.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0034" id="link2H_4_0034">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      You must not think, Dolly, from anything I have been telling you that the
+      Altrurians are ever harsh. Sometimes they cannot realize how things really
+      are with us, and how what seems grotesque and hideous to them seems
+      charming and beautiful, or at least <i>chic</i>, to us. But they are
+      wonderfully quick to see when they have hurt you the least, and in the
+      little sacrifices I have made of my wardrobe to the cause of general
+      knowledge there has not been the least urgence from them. When I now look
+      at the things I used to wear, where they have been finally placed in the
+      ethnological department of the Museum, along with the Esquiman kyaks and
+      the Thlinkeet totems, they seem like things I wore in some prehistoric age&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When wild in woods the noble savage ran.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, am I being unkind? Well, you mustn't mind me, Dolly. You must just
+      say, &ldquo;She <i>has</i> got it bad,&rdquo; and go on and learn as much about
+      Altruria as you can from me. Some of the things were hard to get used to,
+      and at first seemed quite impossible. For one thing, there was the matter
+      of service, which is dishonorable with us, and honorable with the
+      Altrurians: I was a long time getting to understand that, though I knew it
+      perfectly well from hearing my husband talk about it in New York. I
+      believe he once came pretty near offending you by asking why you did not
+      do your own work, or something like that; he has confessed as much, and I
+      could not wonder at you in your conditions. Why, when we first went to the
+      guest-house, and the pretty young girls who brought in lunch sat down at
+      table to eat it with us, I felt the indignation making me hot all over.
+      You know how democratic I am, and I did not mind those great, splendid
+      boat-girls hugging and kissing me, but I instinctively drew the line at
+      cooks and waitresses. In New York, you know, I always tried to be kind to
+      my servants, but as for letting one of them sit down in my presence, much
+      less sit down at table with me, I never dreamed of such a thing in my most
+      democratic moments. Luckily I drew the line subjectively here, and later I
+      found that these young ladies were daughters of some of the most
+      distinguished men and women on the continent, though you must not
+      understand distinction as giving any sort of social primacy; that sort of
+      thing is not allowed in Altruria. They had drawn lots with the girls in
+      the Regionic school here, and were proud of having won the honor of
+      waiting on us. Of course, I needn't say they were what we would have felt
+      to be ladies anywhere, and their manners were exquisite, even to leaving
+      us alone together as soon as we had finished luncheon. The meal itself was
+      something I shall always remember for its delicious cooking of the
+      different kinds of mushrooms which took the place of meat, and the
+      wonderful salads, and the temperate and tropical fruits which we had for
+      dessert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They had to talk mostly with my husband, of course, and when they did talk
+      to me it was through him. They were very intelligent about our world, much
+      more than we are about Altruria, though, of course, it was by deduction
+      from premises rather than specific information, and they wanted to ask a
+      thousand questions; but they saw the joke of it, and laughed with us when
+      Aristides put them off with a promise that if they would have a public
+      meeting appointed we would appear and answer all the questions anybody
+      could think of; we were not going to waste our answers on them the first
+      day. He wanted them to let us go out and help wash the dishes, but they
+      would not hear of it. I confess I was rather glad of that, for it seemed a
+      lower depth to which I could not descend, even after eating with them. But
+      they invited us out to look at the kitchen, after they had got it in order
+      a little, and when we joined them there, whom should I see but my own dear
+      old mother, with an apron up to her chin, wiping the glass and watching
+      carefully through her dear old spectacles that she got everything bright!
+      You know she was of a simpler day than ours, and when she was young she
+      used to do her own work, and she and my father always washed the dishes
+      together after they had company. I merely said, &ldquo;<i>Well</i>, mother!&rdquo; and
+      she laughed and colored, and said she guessed she should like it in
+      Altruria, for it took her back to the America she used to know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I must mention things as they come into my head, and not in any regular
+      order; there are too many of them. One thing is that I did not notice till
+      afterwards that we had had no meat that first day at luncheon&mdash;the
+      mushrooms were so delicious, and you know I never was much of a
+      meat-eater. It was not till we began to make our present tour of the
+      Regionic capitals, where Aristides has had to repeat his account of
+      American civilization until I am sick as well as ashamed of America, that
+      I first felt a kind of famine which I kept myself from recognizing as long
+      as I could. Then I had to own to myself, long before I owned it to him,
+      that I was hungry for <i>meat</i>&mdash;for roast, for broiled, for fried,
+      for hashed. I did not actually tell him, but he found it out, and I could
+      not deny it, though I felt such an ogre in it. He was terribly grieved,
+      and blamed himself for not having thought of it, and wished he had got
+      some canned meats from the trader before she left the port. He was really
+      in despair, for nobody since the old capitalistic times had thought of
+      killing sheep or cattle for food; they have them for wool and milk and
+      butter; and of course when I looked at them in the fields it did seem
+      rather formidable. You are so used to seeing them in the butchers' shops,
+      ready for the range, that you never think of what they have to <i>go
+      through</i> before that. But at last I managed to gasp out, one day, &ldquo;If I
+      could only have a chicken!&rdquo; and he seemed to think that it could be
+      managed. I don't know how he made interest with the authorities, or how
+      the authorities prevailed on a farmer to part with one of his precious
+      pullets; but the thing was done somehow, and two of the farmer's children
+      brought it to us at one of the guest-houses where we were staying, and
+      then fled howling. That was bad enough, but what followed was worse. I
+      went another day on mushrooms before I had the heart to say chicken again
+      and suggest that Aristides should get it killed and dressed. The poor
+      fellow did try, I believe, but we had to fall back upon ourselves for the
+      murderous deed, and&mdash;Did you ever see a chicken have its head cut
+      off, and how hideously it behaves? It made us both wish we were dead; and
+      the sacrifice of that one pullet was quite enough for me. We buried the
+      poor thing under the flowers of the guest-house garden, and I went back to
+      my mushrooms after a visit of contrition to the farmer and many attempts
+      to bring his children to forgiveness. After all, the Altrurian mushrooms
+      are wonderfully nourishing, and they are in such variety that, what with
+      other succulent vegetables and the endless range of fruits and nuts, one
+      does not wish for meat&mdash;meat that one has killed one's self!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0035" id="link2H_4_0035">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I wish you could be making tour of the Regionic capitals with us, Dolly!
+      There are swift little one-rail electric expresses running daily from one
+      capital to another, but these are used only when speed is required, and we
+      are confessedly in no hurry: Aristides wanted me to see as much of the
+      country as possible, and I am as eager as he. The old steam-roads of the
+      capitalistic epoch have been disused for generations, and their beds are
+      now the country roads, which are everywhere kept in beautiful repair.
+      There are no horse vehicles (the electric motors are employed in the
+      towns), though some people travel on horseback, but the favorite means of
+      conveyance is by electric van, which any citizen may have on proof of his
+      need of it; and it is comfortable beyond compare&mdash;mounted on easy
+      springs, and curtained and cushioned like those gypsy vans we see in the
+      country at home. Aristides drives himself, and sometimes we both get out
+      and walk, for there is plenty of time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't know whether I can make you understand how everything has tended
+      to simplification here. They have disused the complicated facilities and
+      conveniences of the capitalistic epoch, which we are so proud of, and have
+      got back as close as possible to nature. People stay at home a great deal
+      more than with us, though if any one likes to make a journey or to visit
+      the capitals he is quite free to do it, and those who have some useful or
+      beautiful object in view make the sacrifice, as they feel it, to leave
+      their villages every day and go to the nearest capital to carry on their
+      studies or experiments. What we consider modern conveniences they would
+      consider a superfluity of naughtiness for the most part. As <i>work</i> is
+      the ideal, they do not believe in what we call labor-saving devices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we approach a village on our journey, one of the villagers, sometimes
+      a young man, and sometimes a girl, comes out to meet us, and when we pass
+      through they send some one with us on the way a little. The people have a
+      perfect inspiration for hospitality: they not only know when to do and how
+      much to do, but how little and when not at all. I can't remember that we
+      have ever once been bored by those nice young things that welcomed us or
+      speeded us on our way, and when we have stopped in a village they have
+      shown a genius for leaving us alone, after the first welcome, that is
+      beautiful. They are so regardful of our privacy, in fact, that if it had
+      not been for Aristides, who explained their ideal to me, I should have
+      felt neglected sometimes, and should have been shy of letting them know
+      that we would like their company. But he understood it, and I must say
+      that I have never enjoyed people and their ways so much. Their hospitality
+      is a sort of compromise between that of the English houses where you are
+      left free at certain houses to follow your own devices absolutely, and
+      that Spanish splendor which assures you that the host's house is yours
+      without meaning it. In fact, the guest-house, wherever we go, <i>is</i>
+      ours, for it belongs to the community, and it is absolutely a home to us
+      for the time being. It is usually the best house in the village, the
+      prettiest and cosiest, where all the houses are so pretty and cosey. There
+      is always another building for public meetings, called the temple, which
+      is the principal edifice, marble and classic and tasteful, which we see
+      almost as much of as the guest-house, for the news of the Emissary's
+      return has preceded him, and everybody is alive with curiosity, and he has
+      to stand and deliver in the village temples everywhere. Of course I am the
+      great attraction, and after being scared by it at first I have rather got
+      to like it; the people are so kind, and unaffected, and really delicate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You mustn't get the notion that the Altrurians are a solemn people at all;
+      they are rather gay, and they like other people's jokes as well as their
+      own; I am sure Mr. Makely, with his sense of humor, would be at home with
+      them at once. The one thing that more than any other has helped them to
+      conceive of the American situation is its being the gigantic joke which we
+      often feel it to be; I don't know but it appears to them more grotesque
+      than it does to us even. At first, when Aristides would explain some
+      peculiarity of ours, they would receive him with a gale of laughing, but
+      this might change into cries of horror and pity later. One of the things
+      that amused and then revolted them most was our patriotism. They thought
+      it the drollest thing in the world that men should be willing to give
+      their own lives and take the lives of other men for the sake of a country
+      which assured them no safety from want, and did not even assure them work,
+      and in which they had no more logical interest than the country they were
+      going to fight. They could understand how a rich man might volunteer for
+      one of our wars, but when they were told that most of our volunteers were
+      poor men, who left their mothers and sisters, or their wives and children,
+      without any means of support, except their meagre pay, they were quite
+      bewildered and stopped laughing, as if the thing had passed a joke. They
+      asked, &ldquo;How if one of these citizen soldiers was killed?&rdquo; and they seemed
+      to suppose that in this case the country would provide for his family and
+      give them work, or if the children were too young would support them at
+      the public expense. It made me creep a little when my husband answered
+      that the family of a crippled or invalided soldier would have a pension of
+      eight or ten or fifteen dollars a month; and when they came back with the
+      question why the citizens of such a country should love it enough to die
+      for it, I could not have said why for the life of me. But Aristides, who
+      is so magnificently generous, tried to give them a notion of the sublimity
+      which is at the bottom of our illogicality and which adjusts so many
+      apparently hopeless points of our anomaly. They asked how this sublimity
+      differed from that of the savage who brings in his game and makes a feast
+      for the whole tribe, and leaves his wife and children without provision
+      against future want; but Aristides told them that there were essential
+      differences between the Americans and savages, which arose from the fact
+      that the savage condition was permanent and the American conditions were
+      unconsciously provisional.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They are quite well informed about our life in some respects, but they
+      wished to hear at first hand whether certain things were really so or not.
+      For instance, they wanted to know whether people were allowed to marry and
+      bring children into the world if they had no hopes of supporting them or
+      educating them, or whether diseased people were allowed to become parents.
+      In Altruria, you know, the families are generally small, only two or three
+      children at the most, so that the parents can devote themselves to them
+      the more fully; and as there is no fear of want here, the state interferes
+      only when the parents are manifestly unfit to bring the little ones up.
+      They imagined that there was something of that kind with us, but when they
+      heard that the state interfered in the family only when the children were
+      unruly, and then it punished the children by sending them to a reform
+      school and disgracing them for life, instead of holding the parents
+      accountable, they seemed to think that it was one of the most anomalous
+      features of our great anomaly. Here, when the father and mother are always
+      quarrelling, the children are taken from them, and the pair are separated,
+      at first for a time, but after several chances for reform they are parted
+      permanently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I must not give you the notion that all our conferences are so
+      serious. Many have merely the character of social entertainments, which
+      are not made here for invited guests, but for any who choose to come; all
+      are welcome. At these there are often plays given by amateurs, and
+      improvised from plots which supply the outline, while the performers
+      supply the dialogue and action, as in the old Italian comedies. The
+      Altrurians are so quick and fine, in fact, that they often remind me of
+      the Italians more than any other people. One night there was for my
+      benefit an American play, as the Altrurians imagined it from what they had
+      read about us, and they had costumed it from the pictures of us they had
+      seen in the newspapers Aristides had sent home while he was with us. The
+      effect was a good deal like that American play which the Japanese company
+      of Sada Yacco gave while it was in New York. It was all about a
+      millionaire's daughter, who was loved by a poor young man and escaped with
+      him to Altruria in an open boat from New York. The millionaire could be
+      distinctly recognized by the dollar-marks which covered him all over, as
+      they do in the caricatures of rich men in our yellow journals. It was
+      funny to the last degree. In the last act he was seen giving his millions
+      away to poor people, whose multitude was represented by the continually
+      coming and going of four or five performers in and out of the door, in
+      outrageously ragged clothes. The Altrurians have not yet imagined the nice
+      degrees of poverty which we have achieved, and they could not have
+      understood that a man with a hundred thousand dollars would have seemed
+      poor to that multi-millionaire. In fact, they do not grasp the idea of
+      money at all. I heard afterwards that in the usual version the millionaire
+      commits suicide in despair, but the piece had been given a happy ending
+      out of kindness to me. I must say that in spite of the monstrous
+      misconception the acting was extremely good, especially that of some comic
+      characters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But dancing is the great national amusement in Altruria, where it has not
+      altogether lost its religious nature. A sort of march in the temples is as
+      much a part of the worship as singing, and so dancing has been preserved
+      from the disgrace which it used to be in with serious people among us. In
+      the lovely afternoons you see young people dancing in the meadows, and
+      hear them shouting in time to the music, while the older men and women
+      watch them from their seats in the shade. Every sort of pleasure here is
+      improvised, and as you pass through a village the first thing you know the
+      young girls and young men start up in a sort of <i>girandole</i>, and
+      linking hands in an endless chain stretch the figure along through the
+      street and out over the highway to the next village, and the next and the
+      next. The work has all been done in the forenoon, and every one who
+      chooses is at liberty to join in the fun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The villages are a good deal alike to a stranger, and we knew what to
+      expect there after a while, but the country is perpetually varied, and the
+      unexpected is always happening in it. The old railroad-beds, on which we
+      travelled, are planted with fruit and nut trees and flowering shrubs, and
+      our progress is through a fragrant bower that is practically endless,
+      except where it takes the shape of a colonnade near the entrance of a
+      village, with vines trained about white pillars, and clusters of grapes
+      (which are ripening just now) hanging down. The change in the climate
+      created by cutting off the southeastern peninsula and letting in the
+      equatorial current, which was begun under the first Altrurian president,
+      with an unexpended war-appropriation, and finished for what one of the old
+      capitalistic wars used to cost, is something perfectly astonishing.
+      Aristides says he told you something about it in his speech at the White
+      Mountains, but you would never believe it without the evidence of your
+      senses. Whole regions to the southward, which were nearest the pole and
+      were sheeted with ice and snow, with the temperature and vegetation of
+      Labrador, now have the climate of Italy; and the mountains, which used to
+      bear nothing but glaciers, are covered with olive orchards and plantations
+      of the delicious coffee which they drink here. Aristides says you could
+      have the same results at home&mdash;no! <i>in the United States</i>&mdash;by
+      cutting off the western shore of Alaska and letting in the Japanese
+      current; and it could be done at the cost of any average war.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0036" id="link2H_4_0036">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      But I must not get away from my personal experiences in these
+      international statistics. Sometimes, when night overtakes us, we stop and
+      camp beside the road, and set about getting our supper of eggs and bread
+      and butter and cheese, or the fruits that are ripening all round us. Since
+      my experience with that pullet I go meekly mushrooming in the fields and
+      pastures; and when I have set the mushrooms stewing over an open fire,
+      Aristides makes the coffee, and in a little while we have a banquet fit
+      for kings&mdash;or for the poor things in every grade below them that
+      serve kings, political or financial or industrial. There is always water,
+      for it is brought down from the snow-fields of the mountains&mdash;there
+      is not much rainfall&mdash;and carried in little concrete channels along
+      the road&mdash;side from village to village, something like those conduits
+      the Italian peasants use to bring down the water from the Maritime Alps to
+      their fields and orchards; and you hear the soft gurgle of it the whole
+      night long, and day long, too, whenever you stop. After supper we can read
+      awhile by our electric lamp (we tap the current in the telephone wires
+      anywhere), or Aristides sacrifices himself to me in a lesson of Altrurian
+      grammar. Then we creep back into our van and fall asleep with the Southern
+      Cross glittering over our heads. It is perfectly safe, though it was a
+      long time before I could imagine the perfect safety of it. In a country
+      where there are no thieves, because a thief here would not know what to do
+      with his booty, we are secure from human molestation, and the land has
+      long been cleared of all sorts of wild beasts, without being unpleasantly
+      tamed. It is like England in that, and yet it has a touch of the sylvan,
+      which you feel nowhere as you do in our dear New England hill country.
+      There was one night, however, when we were lured on and on, and did not
+      stop to camp till fairly in the dusk. Then we went to sleep without
+      supper, for we had had rather a late lunch and were not hungry, and about
+      one o'clock in the morning I was awakened by voices speaking Altrurian
+      together. I recognized my husband's voice, which is always so kind, but
+      which seemed to have a peculiarly tender and compassionate note in it now.
+      The other was lower and of a sadness which wrung my heart, though I did
+      not know in the least what the person was saying. The talk went on a long
+      time, at first about some matter of immediate interest, as I fancied, and
+      then apparently it branched off on some topic which seemed to concern the
+      stranger, whoever he was. Then it seemed to get more indistinct, as if the
+      stranger were leaving us and Aristides were going a little way with him.
+      Presently I heard him coming back, and he put his head in at the van
+      curtains, as if to see whether I was asleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; I said, and he said how sorry he was for having waked me. &ldquo;Oh, I
+      don't mind,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Whom were you talking with? He had the saddest voice
+      I ever heard. What did he want?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, it seems that we are not far from the ruins of one of the old
+      capitalistic cities, which have been left for a sort of warning against
+      the former conditions, and he wished to caution us against the malarial
+      influences from it. I think perhaps we had better push on a little way, if
+      you don't mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The moon was shining clearly, and of course I did not mind, and Aristides
+      got his hand on the lever, and we were soon getting out of the dangerous
+      zone. &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;they ought to abolish that pest-hole. I doubt
+      if it serves any good purpose, now, though it has been useful in times
+      past as an object-lesson.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But who was your unknown friend?&rdquo; I asked, a great deal more curious
+      about him than about the capitalistic ruin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, just a poor murderer,&rdquo; he answered easily, and I shuddered back: &ldquo;A
+      murderer!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. He killed his friend some fifteen years ago in a jealous rage, and
+      he is pursued by remorse that gives him no peace.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And is the remorse his only punishment?&rdquo; I asked, rather indignantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isn't that enough? God seemed to think it was, in the case of the first
+      murderer, who killed his brother. All that he did to Cain was to set a
+      mark on him. But we have not felt sure that we have the right to do this.
+      We let God mark him, and He has done it with this man in the sorrow of his
+      face. I was rather glad you, couldn't see him, my dear. It is an awful
+      face.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I confess that this sounded like mere sentimentalism to me, and I said,
+      &ldquo;Really, Aristides, I can't follow you. How are innocent people to be
+      protected against this wretch, if he wanders about among them at will?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are as safe from him as from any other man in Altruria. His case was
+      carefully looked into by the medical authorities, and it was decided that
+      he was perfectly sane, so that he could be safely left at large, to
+      expiate his misdeed in the only possible way that such a misdeed can be
+      expiated&mdash;by doing good to others. What would you have had us do with
+      him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The question rather staggered me, but I said, &ldquo;He ought to have been
+      imprisoned at least a year for manslaughter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cain was not imprisoned an hour.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was a very different thing. But suppose you let a man go at large
+      who has killed his friend in a jealous rage, what do you do with other
+      murderers?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In Altruria there can be no other murderers. People cannot kill here for
+      money, which prompts every other kind of murder in capitalistic countries,
+      as well as every other kind of crime. I know, my dear, that this seems
+      very strange to you, but you will accustom yourself to the idea, and then
+      you will see the reasonableness of the Altrurian plan. On the whole, I am
+      sorry you could not have seen that hapless man, and heard him. He had a
+      face like death&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And a voice like death, too!&rdquo; I put in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You noticed that? He wanted to talk about his crime with me. He wants to
+      talk about it with any one who will listen to him. He is consumed with an
+      undying pity for the man he slew. That is the first thing, the only thing,
+      in his mind. If he could, I believe he would give his life for the life he
+      took at any moment. But you cannot recreate one life by destroying
+      another. There is no human means of ascertaining justice, but we can
+      always do mercy with divine omniscience.&rdquo; As he spoke the sun pierced the
+      edge of the eastern horizon, and lit up the marble walls and roofs of the
+      Regionic capital which we were approaching.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the meeting we had there in the afternoon, Aristides reported our
+      having been warned against our danger in the night by that murderer, and
+      public record of the fact was made. The Altrurians consider any sort of
+      punishment which is not expiation a far greater sin than the wrong it
+      visits, and altogether barren and useless. After the record in this case
+      had been made, the conference naturally turned upon what Aristides had
+      seen of the treatment of criminals in America, and when, he told of our
+      prisons, where people merely arrested and not yet openly accused are kept,
+      I did not know which way to look, for you know I am still an American at
+      heart, Dolly. Did you ever see the inside of one of our police-stations at
+      night? Or smell it? I did, once, when I went to give bail for a wretched
+      girl who had been my servant, and had gone wrong, but had been arrested
+      for theft, and I assure you that the sight and the smell woke me in the
+      night for a month afterwards, and I have never quite ceased to dream about
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Altrurians listened in silence, and I hoped they could not realize the
+      facts, though the story was every word true; but what seemed to make them
+      the most indignant was the treatment of the families of the prisoners in
+      what we call our penitentiaries and reformatories. At first they did not
+      conceive of it, apparently, because it was so stupidly barbarous; they
+      have no patience with stupidity; and when Aristides had carefully
+      explained, it seemed as if they could not believe it. They thought it
+      right that the convicts should be made to work, but they could not
+      understand that the state really took away their wages, and left their
+      families to suffer for want of the support which it had deprived them of.
+      They said this was punishing the mothers and sisters, the wives and
+      children of the prisoners, and was like putting out the eyes of an
+      offender's innocent relatives as they had read was done in Oriental
+      countries. They asked if there was never any sort of protest against such
+      an atrocious perversion of justice, and when the question was put to me I
+      was obliged to own that I had never heard the system even criticised.
+      Perhaps it has been, but I spoke only from my own knowledge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0037" id="link2H_4_0037">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Well, to get away from these dismal experiences, and come back to our
+      travels, with their perpetual novelty, and the constantly varying beauty
+      of the country!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The human interest of the landscape, that is always the great interest of
+      it, and I wish I could make you feel it as I have felt it in this
+      wonderful journey of ours. It is like the New England landscape at times,
+      in its kind of gentle wildness, but where it has been taken back into the
+      hand of man, how different the human interest is! Instead of a rheumatic
+      old farmer, in his clumsy clothes, with some of his gaunt girls to help
+      him, or perhaps his ageing wife, getting in the hay of one of those sweet
+      meadows, and looking like so many animated scarecrows at their work; or
+      instead of some young farmer, on the seat of his clattering mower, or
+      mounted high over his tedder, but as much alone as if there were no one
+      else in the neighborhood, silent and dull, or fierce or sullen, as the
+      case might be, the work is always going on with companies of mowers or
+      reapers, or planters, that chatter like birds or sing like them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is no use my explaining again and again that in a country like this,
+      where everybody works, nobody over works, and that when the few hours of
+      obligatory labor are passed in the mornings, people need not do anything
+      unless they choose. Their working-dresses are very simple, but in all
+      sorts of gay colors, like those you saw in the Greek play at Harvard, with
+      straw hats for the men, and fillets of ribbon for the girls, and sandals
+      for both. I speak of girls, for most of the married women are at home
+      gardening, or about the household work, but men of every age work in the
+      fields. The earth is dear to them because they get their life from it by
+      labor that is not slavery; they come to love it every acre, every foot,
+      because they have known it from childhood; and I have seen old men, very
+      old, pottering about the orchards and meadows during the hours of
+      voluntary work, and trimming them up here and there, simply because they
+      could not keep away from the place, or keep their hands off the trees and
+      bushes. Sometimes in the long, tender afternoons, we see far up on some
+      pasture slope, groups of girls scattered about on the grass, with their
+      sewing, or listening to some one reading. Other times they are giving a
+      little play, usually a comedy, for life is so happy here that tragedy
+      would not be true to it, with the characters coming and going in a grove
+      of small pines, for the <i>coulisses</i>, and using a level of grass for
+      the stage. If we stop, one of the audience comes down to us and invites us
+      to come up and see the play, which keeps on in spite of the sensation that
+      I can feel I make among them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everywhere the news of us has gone before us, and there is a universal
+      curiosity to get a look at Aristides' capitalistic wife, as they call me.
+      I made him translate it, and he explained that the word was merely
+      descriptive and not characteristic; some people distinguished and called
+      me American. There was one place where they were having a picnic in the
+      woods up a hillside, and they asked us to join them, so we turned our van
+      into the roadside and followed the procession. It was headed by two old
+      men playing on pipes, and after these came children singing, and then all
+      sorts of people, young and old. When we got to an open place in the woods,
+      where there was a spring, and smooth grass, they built fires, and began to
+      get ready for the feast, while some of them did things to amuse the rest.
+      Every one could do something; if you can imagine a party of artists, it
+      was something like that. I should say the Altrurians had artists' manners,
+      free, friendly, and easy, with a dash of humor in everything, and a
+      wonderful willingness to laugh and make laugh. Aristides is always
+      explaining that the artist is their ideal type; that is, some one who
+      works gladly, and plays as gladly as he works; no one here is asked to do
+      work that he hates, unless he seems to hate every kind of work. When this
+      happens, the authorities find out something for him that he had <i>better</i>
+      like, by letting him starve till he works. That picnic lasted the whole
+      afternoon and well into the night, and then the picnickers went home
+      through the starlight, leading the little ones, or carrying them when they
+      were too little or too tired. But first they came down to our van with us,
+      and sang us a serenade after we had disappeared into it, and then left us,
+      and sent their voices back to us out of the dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One morning at dawn, as we came into a village, we saw nearly the whole
+      population mounting the marble steps of the temple, all the holiday dress
+      of the Voluntaries, which they put on here every afternoon when the work
+      is done. Last of the throng came a procession of children, looking
+      something like a May-Day party, and midway of their line were a young man
+      and a young girl, hand in hand, who parted at the door of the temple, and
+      entered separately. Aristides called out, &ldquo;Oh, it is a wedding! You are in
+      luck, Eveleth,&rdquo; and then and there I saw my first Altrurian wedding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within, the pillars and the altar and the seats of the elders were
+      garlanded with flowers, so fresh and fragrant that they seemed to have
+      blossomed from the marble overnight, and there was a soft murmur of
+      Altrurian voices that might very well have seemed the hum of bees among
+      the blossoms. This subsided, as the young couple, who had paused just
+      inside the temple door, came up the middle side by side, and again
+      separated and took their places, the youth on the extreme right of the
+      elder, and the maiden on the extreme left of the eldresses, and stood
+      facing the congregation, which was also on foot, and joined in the hymn
+      which everybody sang. Then one of the eldresses rose and began a sort of
+      statement which Aristides translated to me afterwards. She said that the
+      young couple whom we saw there had for the third time asked to become man
+      and wife, after having believed for a year that they loved each other, and
+      having statedly come before the marriage authorities and been questioned
+      as to the continuance of their affection. She said that probably every one
+      present knew that they had been friends from childhood, and none would be
+      surprised that they now wished to be united for life. They had been
+      carefully instructed as to the serious nature of the marriage bond, and
+      admonished as to the duties they were entering into, not only to each
+      other, but to the community. At each successive visit to the authorities
+      they had been warned, separately and together, against the danger of
+      trusting to anything like a romantic impulse, and they had faithfully
+      endeavored to act upon this advice, as they testified. In order to prove
+      the reality of their affection, they had been parted every third month,
+      and had lived during that time in different Regions where it was meant
+      they should meet many other young people, so that if they felt any
+      swerving of the heart they might not persist in an intention which could
+      only bring them final unhappiness. It seems this is the rule in the case
+      of young lovers, and people usually marry very young here, but if they
+      wish to marry later in life the rule is not enforced so stringently, or
+      not at all. The bride and groom we saw had both stood these trials, and at
+      each return they had been more and more sure that they loved each other,
+      and loved no one else. Now they were here to unite their hands, and to
+      declare the union of their hearts before the people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the eldress sat down and an elder arose, who bade the young people
+      come forward to the centre of the line, where the elders and eldresses
+      were sitting. He took his place behind them, and once more and for the
+      last time he conjured them not to persist if they felt any doubt of
+      themselves. He warned them that if they entered into the married state,
+      and afterwards repented to the point of seeking divorce, the divorce would
+      indeed be granted them, but on terms, as they must realize, of lasting
+      grief to themselves through the offence they would commit against the
+      commonwealth. They answered that they were sure of themselves, and ready
+      to exchange their troth for life and death. Then they joined hands, and
+      declared that they took each other for husband and wife. The congregation
+      broke into another hymn and slowly dispersed, leaving the bride and groom
+      with their families, who came up to them and embraced them, pressing their
+      cheeks against the cheeks of the young pair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This ended the solemnity, and then the festivity began, as it ended, with
+      a wedding feast, where people sang and danced and made speeches and drank
+      toasts, and the fun was kept up till the hours of the Obligatories
+      approached; and then, what do you think? The married pair put off their
+      wedding garments with the rest and went to work in the fields! Later, I
+      understood, if they wished to take a wedding journey they could freely do
+      so; but the first thing in their married life they must honor the
+      Altrurian ideal of work, by which every one must live in order that every
+      other may live without overwork. I believe that the marriage ceremonial is
+      something like that of the Quakers, but I never saw a Quaker wedding, and
+      I could only compare this with the crazy romps with which our
+      house-weddings often end, with throwing of rice and old shoes, and tying
+      ribbons to the bridal carriage and baggage, and following the pair to the
+      train with outbreaks of tiresome hilarity, which make them conspicuous
+      before their fellow-travellers; or with some of our ghastly church
+      weddings, in which the religious ceremonial is lost in the social effect,
+      and ends with that everlasting thumping march from &ldquo;Lohengrin,&rdquo; and the
+      outsiders storming about the bridal pair and the guests with the rude
+      curiosity that the fattest policemen at the canopied and carpeted entrance
+      cannot check.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0038" id="link2H_4_0038">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      We have since been at other weddings and at christenings and at funerals.
+      The ceremonies are always held in the temples, and are always in the same
+      serious spirit. As the Altrurians are steadfast believers in immortality,
+      there is a kind of solemn elevation in the funeral ceremonies which I
+      cannot give you a real notion of. It is helped, I think, by the custom of
+      not performing the ceremony over the dead; a brief rite is reserved for
+      the cemetery, where it is wished that the kindred shall not be present,
+      lest they think always of the material body and not of the spiritual body
+      which shall be raised in incorruption. Religious service is held in the
+      temples every day at the end of the Obligatories, and whenever we are near
+      a village or in any of the capitals we always go. It is very simple. After
+      a hymn, to which the people sometimes march round the interior of the
+      temple, each lays on the altar an offering from the fields or woods where
+      they have been working, if it is nothing but a head of grain or a wild
+      flower or a leaf. Then any one is at liberty to speak, but any one else
+      may go out without offence. There is no ritual; sometimes they read a
+      chapter from the New Testament, preferably a part of the story of Christ
+      or a passage from His discourses. The idea of coming to the temple at the
+      end of the day's labor is to consecrate that day's work, and they do not
+      call anything work that is not work with the hands. When I explained, or
+      tried to explain, that among us a great many people worked with their
+      brains, to amuse others or to get handwork out of them, they were unable
+      to follow me. I asked if they did not consider composing music or poetry
+      or plays, or painting pictures work, and they said, No, that was pleasure,
+      and must be indulged only during the Voluntaries; it was never to be
+      honored like work with the hands, for it would not equalize the burden of
+      that, but might put an undue share of it on others. They said that lives
+      devoted to such pursuits must be very unwholesome, and they brought me to
+      book about the lives of most artists, literary men, and financiers in the
+      capitalistic world to prove what they said. They held that people must
+      work with their hands willingly, in the artistic spirit, but they could
+      only do that when they knew that others differently gifted were working in
+      like manner with their hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I couldn't begin to tell you all our queer experiences. As I have kept
+      saying, I am a great curiosity everywhere, and I could flatter myself that
+      people were more eager to see me than to hear Aristides. Sometimes I
+      couldn't help thinking that they expected to find me an awful warning, a
+      dreadful example of whatever a woman ought not to be, and a woman from
+      capitalistic conditions must be logically. But sometimes they were very
+      intelligent, even the simplest villagers, as we should call them, though
+      there is such an equality of education and opportunity here that no
+      simplicity of life has the effect of dulling people as it has with us. One
+      thing was quite American: they always wanted to know how I liked Altruria,
+      and when I told them, as I sincerely could, that I adored it, they were
+      quite affecting in their pleasure. They generally asked if I would like to
+      go back to America, and when I said No, they were delighted beyond
+      anything. They said I must become a citizen and vote and take part in the
+      government, for that was every woman's duty as well as right; it was wrong
+      to leave the whole responsibility to the men. They asked if American women
+      took no interest in the government, and when I told them there was a very
+      small number who wished to influence politics socially, as the
+      Englishwomen did, but without voting or taking any responsibility, they
+      were shocked. In one of the Regionic capitals they wanted me to speak
+      after Aristides, but I had nothing prepared; at the next I did get off a
+      little speech in English, which he translated after me. Later he put it
+      into Altrurian, and I memorized it, and made myself immensely popular by
+      parroting it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The pronunciation of Altrurian is not difficult, for it is spelled
+      phonetically, and the sounds are very simple. Where they were once
+      difficult they have been simplified, for here the simplification of life
+      extends to everything; and the grammar has been reduced in its structure
+      till it is as elemental as English grammar or Norwegian. The language is
+      Greek in origin, but the intricate inflections and the declensions have
+      been thrown away, and it has kept only the simplest forms. You must get
+      Mr. Twelvemough to explain this to you, Dolly, for it would take me too
+      long, and I have so much else to tell you. A good many of the women have
+      taken up English, but they learn it as a dead language, and they give it a
+      comical effect by trying to pronounce it as it is spelled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose you are anxious, if these letters which are piling up and piling
+      up should ever reach you, or even start to do so, to know something about
+      the Altrurian cities, and what they are like. Well, in the first place,
+      you must cast all images of American cities out of your mind, or any
+      European cities, except, perhaps, the prettiest and stateliest parts of
+      Paris, where there is a regular sky-line, and the public buildings and
+      monuments are approached through shaded avenues. There are no private
+      houses here, in our sense&mdash;that is, houses which people have built
+      with their own money on their own land, and made as ugly outside and as
+      molestive to their neighbors and the passers-by as they chose. As the
+      buildings belong to the whole people, the first requirement is that they
+      shall be beautiful inside and out. There are a few grand edifices looking
+      like Greek temples, which are used for the government offices, and these
+      are, of course, the most dignified, but the dwellings are quite as
+      attractive and comfortable. They are built round courts, with gardens and
+      flowers in the courts, and wide grassy spaces round them. They are rather
+      tall, but never so tall as our great hotels or apartment-houses, and the
+      floors are brought to one level by elevators, which are used only in the
+      capitals; and, generally speaking, I should say the villages were
+      pleasanter than the cities. In fact, the village is the Altrurian ideal,
+      and there is an effort everywhere to reduce the size of the towns and
+      increase the number of the villages. The outlying farms have been gathered
+      into these, and now there is not one of those lonely places in the
+      country, like those where our farmers toil alone outdoors and their wives
+      alone indoors, and both go mad so often in the solitude. The villages are
+      almost in sight of each other, and the people go to their fields in
+      company, while the women carry on their house-keeping co-operatively, with
+      a large kitchen which they use in common; they have their meals apart or
+      together, as they like. If any one is sick or disabled the neighbors come
+      in and help do her work, as they used with us in the early times, and as
+      they still do in country places. Village life here is preferred, just as
+      country life is in England, and one thing that will amuse you, with your
+      American ideas, and your pride in the overgrowth of our cities: the
+      Altrurian papers solemnly announce from time to time that the population
+      of such or such a capital has been reduced so many hundreds or thousands
+      since the last census. That means that the villages in the neighborhood
+      have been increased in number and population.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile, I must say the capitals are delightful: clean, airy, quiet,
+      with the most beautiful architecture, mostly classic and mostly marble,
+      with rivers running through them and round them, and every real
+      convenience, but not a clutter of artificial conveniences, as with us. In
+      the streets there are noiseless trolleys (where they have not been
+      replaced by public automobiles) which the long distances of the ample
+      ground-plan make rather necessary, and the rivers are shot over with swift
+      motor-boats; for the short distances you always expect to walk, or if you
+      don't expect it, you walk anyway. The car-lines and boat-lines are public,
+      and they are free, for the Altrurians think that the community owes
+      transportation to every one who lives beyond easy reach of the points
+      which their work calls them to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course the great government stores are in the capitals, and practically
+      there are no stores in the villages, except for what you might call
+      emergency supplies. But you must not imagine, Dolly, that shopping, here,
+      is like shopping at home&mdash;or in America, as I am learning to say, for
+      Altruria is home now. That is, you don't fill your purse with bank-notes,
+      or have things charged. You get everything you want, within reason, and
+      certainly everything you need, for nothing. You have only to provide
+      yourself with a card, something like that you have to show at the Army and
+      Navy Stores in London, when you first go to buy there, which certifies
+      that you belong to this or that working-phalanx, and that you have not
+      failed in the Obligatories for such and such a length of time. If you are
+      not entitled to this card, you had better not go shopping, for there is no
+      possible equivalent for it which will enable you to carry anything away or
+      have it sent to your house. At first I could not help feeling rather
+      indignant when I was asked to show my work-card in the stores; I had
+      usually forgotten to bring it, or sometimes I had brought my husband's
+      card, which would not do at all, unless I could say that I had been ill or
+      disabled, for a woman is expected to work quite the same as a man. Of
+      course her housework counts, and as we are on a sort of public mission,
+      they count our hours of travel as working-hours, especially as Aristides
+      has made it a point of good citizenship for us to stop every now and then
+      and join in the Obligatories when the villagers were getting in the farm
+      crops or quarrying stone or putting up a house. I am never much use in
+      quarrying or building, but I come in strong in the hay-fields or the apple
+      orchards or the orange groves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shopping here is not so enslaving as it is with us&mdash;I mean, with
+      you&mdash;because the fashions do not change, and you get things only when
+      you need them, not when you want them, or when other people think you do.
+      The costume was fixed long ago, when the Altrurian era began, by a
+      commission of artists, and it would be considered very bad form as well as
+      bad morals to try changing it in the least. People are allowed to choose
+      their own colors, but if one goes very wrong, or so far wrong as to offend
+      the public taste, she is gently admonished by the local art commission. If
+      she insists, they let her have her own way, but she seldom wants it when
+      she knows that people think her a fright. Of course the costume is
+      modified somewhat for the age and shape of the wearer, but this is not so
+      often as you might think. There are no very lean or very stout people,
+      though there are old and young, just as there are with us. But the
+      Altrurians keep young very much longer than capitalistic peoples do, and
+      the life of work keeps down their weight. You know I used to incline a
+      little to over-plumpness, I really believe because I overate at times
+      simply to keep from thinking of the poor who had to undereat, but that is
+      quite past now; I have lost at least twenty-five pounds from working
+      out-doors and travelling so much and living very, very simply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0039" id="link2H_4_0039">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I have to jot things down as they come into my mind, and I am afraid I
+      forget some of the most important. Everybody is so novel on this famous
+      tour of ours that I am continually interested, but one has one's
+      preferences even in Altruria, and I believe I like best the wives of the
+      artists and literary men whom one finds working in the galleries and
+      libraries of the capitals everywhere. They are not more intelligent than
+      other women, perhaps, but they are more sympathetic; and one sees so
+      little of those people in New York, for all they abound there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The galleries are not only for the exhibition of pictures, but each has
+      numbers of ateliers, where the artists work and teach. The libraries are
+      the most wonderfully imagined things. You do not have to come and study in
+      them, but if you are working up any particular subject, the books relating
+      to it are sent to your dwelling every morning and brought away every noon,
+      so that during the obligatory hours you have them completely at your
+      disposition, and during the Voluntaries you can consult them with the rest
+      of the public in the library; it is not thought best that study should be
+      carried on throughout the day, and the results seem to justify this
+      theory. If you want to read a book merely for pleasure, you are allowed to
+      take it out and live with it as long as you like; the copy you have is
+      immediately replaced with another, so that you do not feel hurried and are
+      not obliged to ramp through it in a week or a fortnight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Altrurian books are still rather sealed books to me, but they are
+      delightful to the eye, all in large print on wide margins, with flexible
+      bindings, and such light paper that you can hold them in one hand
+      indefinitely without tiring. I must send you some with this, if I ever get
+      my bundle of letters off to you. You will see by the dates that I am
+      writing you one every day; I had thought of keeping a journal for you, but
+      then I should have had left out a good many things that happened during
+      our first days, when the impressions were so vivid, and I should have got
+      to addressing my records to myself, and I think I had better keep to the
+      form of letters. If they reach you, and you read them at random, why that
+      is very much the way I write them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I despair of giving you any real notion of the capitals, but if you
+      remember the White City at the Columbian Fair at Chicago in 1893, you can
+      have some idea of the general effect of one; only there is nothing
+      heterogeneous in their beauty. There is one classic rule in the
+      architecture, but each of the different architects may characterize an
+      edifice from himself, just as different authors writing the same language
+      characterize it by the diction natural to him. There are suggestions of
+      the capitals in some of our cities, and if you remember Commonwealth
+      Avenue in Boston, you can imagine something like the union of street and
+      garden which every street of them is. The trolleys run under the
+      overarching trees between the lawns, flanked by gravelled footpaths
+      between flower-beds, and you take the cars or not as you like. As there is
+      no hurry, they go about as fast as English trams, and the clanger from
+      them is practically reduced to nothing by the crossings dipping under them
+      at the street corners. The centre of the capital is approached by
+      colonnades, which at night bear groups of great bulbous lamps, and by day
+      flutter with the Altrurian and Regionic flags. Around this centre are the
+      stores and restaurants and theatres, and galleries and libraries, with
+      arcades over the sidewalks, like those in Bologna; sometimes the arcades
+      are in two stories, as they are in Chester. People are constantly coming
+      and going in an easy way during the afternoon, though in the morning the
+      streets are rather deserted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But what is the use? I could go on describing and describing, and never
+      get in half the differences from American cities, with their hideous
+      uproar, and their mud in the wet, and their clouds of swirling dust in the
+      wind. But there is one feature which I must mention, because you can fancy
+      it from the fond dream of a great national highway which some of our
+      architects projected while they were still in the fervor of excitement
+      from the beauty of the Peristyle, and other features of the White City.
+      They really have such a highway here, crossing the whole Altrurian
+      continent, and uniting the circle of the Regionic capitals. As we
+      travelled for a long time by the country roads on the beds of the old
+      railways, I had no idea of this magnificent avenue, till one day my
+      husband suddenly ran our van into the one leading up to the first capital
+      we were to visit. Then I found myself between miles and miles of stately
+      white pillars, rising and sinking as the road found its natural levels,
+      and growing in the perspective before us and dwindling behind us. I could
+      not keep out of my mind a colonnade of palm-trees, only the fronds were
+      lacking, and there were never palms so beautiful. Each pillar was
+      inscribed with the name of some Altrurian who had done something for his
+      country, written some beautiful poem or story, or history, made some
+      scientific discovery, composed an opera, invented a universal convenience,
+      performed a wonderful cure, or been a delightful singer, or orator, or
+      gardener, or farmer. Not one soldier, general or admiral, among them! That
+      seemed very strange to me, and I asked Aristides how it was. Like
+      everything else in Altruria, it was very simple; there had been no war for
+      so long that there were no famous soldiers to commemorate. But he stopped
+      our van when he came to the first of the many arches which spanned the
+      highway, and read out to me in English the Altrurian record that it was
+      erected in honor of the first President of the Altrurian Commonwealth, who
+      managed the negotiations when the capitalistic oligarchies to the north
+      and south were peacefully annexed, and the descendants of the three
+      nations joined in the commemoration of an event that abolished war forever
+      on the Altrurian continent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here I can imagine Mr. Makely asking who footed the bills for this beauty
+      and magnificence, and whether these works were constructed at the cost of
+      the nation, or the different Regions, or the abuttors on the different
+      highways. But the fact is, you poor, capitalistic dears, they cost nobody
+      a dollar, for there is not a dollar in Altruria. You must worry into the
+      idea somehow that in Altruria you cannot buy anything except by working,
+      and that work is the current coin of the republic: you pay for everything
+      by drops of sweat, and off your own brow, not somebody else's brow. The
+      people built these monuments and colonnades, and aqueducts and highways
+      and byways, and sweet villages and palatial cities with their own hands,
+      after the designs of artists, who also took part in the labor. But it was
+      a labor that they delighted in so much that they chose to perform it
+      during the Voluntaries, when they might have been resting, and not during
+      the Obligatories, when they were required to work. So it was all joy and
+      all glory. They say there never was such happiness in any country since
+      the world began. While the work went on it was like a perpetual Fourth of
+      July or an everlasting picnic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I know you hate this sort of economical stuff, Dolly, and I will make
+      haste to get down to business, as Mr. Makely would say, for I am really
+      coming to something that you will think worth while. One morning, when we
+      had made half the circle of the capitals, and were on the homestretch to
+      the one where we had left our dear mother&mdash;for Aristides claims her,
+      too&mdash;and I was letting that dull nether anxiety for her come to the
+      top, though we had had the fullest telephonic talks with her every day,
+      and knew she was well and happy, we came round the shoulder of a wooded
+      cliff and found ourselves on an open stretch of the northern coast. At
+      first I could only exclaim at the beauty of the sea, lying blue and still
+      beyond a long beach closed by another headland, and I did not realize that
+      a large yacht which I saw close to land had gone ashore. The beach was
+      crowded with Altrurians, who seemed to have come to the rescue, for they
+      were putting off to the yacht in boats and returning with passengers, and
+      jumping out, and pulling their boats with them up on to the sand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was quite bewildered, and I don't know what to say I was the next thing,
+      when I saw that the stranded yacht was flying the American flag from her
+      peak. I supposed she must be one of our cruisers, she was so large, and
+      the first thing that flashed into my mind was a kind of amused wonder what
+      those poor Altrurians would do with a ship-of-war and her marines and
+      crew. I couldn't ask any coherent questions, and luckily Aristides was
+      answering my incoherent ones in the best possible way by wheeling our van
+      down on the beach and making for the point nearest the yacht. He had time
+      to say he did not believe she was a government vessel, and, in fact, I
+      remembered that once I had seen a boat in the North River getting up steam
+      to go to Europe which was much larger, and had her decks covered with
+      sailors that I took for bluejackets; but she was only the private yacht of
+      some people I knew. These stupid things kept going and coming in my mind
+      while my husband was talking with some of the Altrurian girls who were
+      there helping with the men. They said that the yacht had gone ashore the
+      night before last in one of the sudden fogs that come up on that coast,
+      and that some people whom the sailors seemed to obey were camping on the
+      edge of the upland above the beach, under a large tent they had brought
+      from the yacht. They had refused to go to the guest-house in the nearest
+      village, and as nearly as the girls could make out they expected the yacht
+      to get afloat from tide to tide, and then intended to re-embark on her. In
+      the mean time they had provisioned themselves from the ship, and were
+      living in a strange way of their own. Some of them seemed to serve the
+      others, but these appeared to be used with a very ungrateful indifference,
+      as if they were of a different race. There was one who wore a white apron
+      and white cap who directed the cooking for the rest, and had several
+      assistants; and from time to time very disagreeable odors came from the
+      camp, like burning flesh. The Altrurians had carried them fruits and
+      vegetables, but the men-assistants had refused them contemptuously and
+      seemed suspicious of the variety of mushrooms they offered them. They
+      called out, &ldquo;To-stoo!&rdquo; and I understood that the strangers were afraid
+      they were bringing toad-stools. One of the Altrurian girls had been
+      studying English in the nearest capital, and she had tried to talk with
+      these people, pronouncing it in the Altrurian way, but they could make
+      nothing of one another; then she wrote down what she wanted to say, but as
+      she spelled it phonetically they were not able to read her English. She
+      asked us if I was the American Altrurian she had heard of, and when I said
+      yes she lost no time in showing us to the camp of the castaways.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As soon as we saw their tents we went forward till we were met at the
+      largest by a sort of marine footman, who bowed slightly and said to me,
+      &ldquo;What name shall I say, ma'am?&rdquo; and I answered distinctly, so that he
+      might get the name right, &ldquo;Mr. and Mrs. Homos.&rdquo; Then he held back the flap
+      of the marquee, which seemed to serve these people as a drawing-room, and
+      called out, standing very rigidly upright, to let us pass, in the way that
+      I remembered so well, &ldquo;Mr. And Mrs. 'Omos!&rdquo; and a severe-looking, rather
+      elderly lady rose to meet us with an air that was both anxious and
+      forbidding, and before she said anything else she burst out, &ldquo;You don't
+      mean to say you speak English?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I said that I spoke English, and had not spoken anything else but rather
+      poor French until six months before, and then she demanded, &ldquo;Have you been
+      cast away on this outlandish place, too?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I laughed and said I lived here, and I introduced my husband as well as I
+      could without knowing her name. He explained with his pretty Altrurian
+      accent, which you used to like so much, that we had ventured to come in
+      the hope of being of use to them, and added some regrets for their
+      misfortune so sweetly that I wondered she could help responding in kind.
+      But she merely said, &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; and then she seemed to recollect herself, and
+      frowning to a very gentle-looking old man to come forward, she ignored my
+      husband in presenting me. &ldquo;Mr. Thrall, Mrs. &mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She hesitated for my name, and I supplied it, &ldquo;Homos,&rdquo; and as the old man
+      had put out his hand in a kindly way I took it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And this is my husband, Aristides Homos, an Altrurian,&rdquo; I said, and then,
+      as the lady had not asked us to sit down, or shown the least sign of
+      liking our being there, the natural woman flamed up in me as she hadn't in
+      all the time I have been away from New York. &ldquo;I am glad you are so
+      comfortable here, Mr. Thrall. You won't need us, I see. The people about
+      will do anything in their power for you. Come, my dear,&rdquo; and I was
+      sweeping out of that tent in a manner calculated to give the eminent
+      millionaire's wife a notion of Altrurian hauteur which I must own would
+      have been altogether mistaken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I knew who they were perfectly. Even if I had not once met them I should
+      have known that they were the ultra-rich Thralls, from the multitudinous
+      pictures of them that I had seen in the papers at home, not long after
+      they came on to New York.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was beginning, &ldquo;Oh no, oh no,&rdquo; but I cut in. &ldquo;My husband and I are on
+      our way to the next Regionic capital, and we are somewhat hurried. You
+      will be quite well looked after by the neighbors here, and I see that we
+      are rather in your housekeeper's way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It <i>was</i> nasty, Dolly, and I won't deny it; it was <i>vulgar</i>. But
+      what would <i>you</i> have done? I could feel Aristides' mild eye sadly on
+      me, and I was sorry for him, but I assure him I was not sorry for them,
+      till that old man spoke again, so timidly: &ldquo;It isn't my&mdash;it's my
+      wife, Mrs. Homos. Let me introduce her. But haven't we met before?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps during my first husband's lifetime. I was Mrs. Bellington
+      Strange.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. P. Bellington Strange? Your husband was a dear friend of mine when
+      we were both young&mdash;a good man, if ever there was one; the best in
+      the world! I am so glad to see you again. Ah&mdash;my dear, you remember
+      my speaking of Mrs. Strange?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took my hand again and held it in his soft old hands, as if hesitating
+      whether to transfer it to her, and my heart melted towards him. You may
+      think it very odd, Dolly, but it was what he said of my dear, dead husband
+      that softened me. It made him seem very fatherly, and I felt the affection
+      for him that I felt for my husband, when he seemed more like a father.
+      Aristides and I often talk of it, and he has no wish that I should forget
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Thrall made no motion to take my hand from him, but she said, &ldquo;I
+      think I have met Mr. Strange,&rdquo; and now I saw in the background, sitting on
+      a camp-stool near a long, lank young man stretched in a hammock, a very
+      handsome girl, who hastily ran through a book, and then dropped it at the
+      third mention of my name. I suspected that the book was the Social
+      Register, and that the girl's search for me had been satisfactory, for she
+      rose and came vaguely towards us, while the young man unfolded himself
+      from the hammock, and stood hesitating, but looking as if he rather liked
+      what had happened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Thrall bustled about for camp-stools, and said, &ldquo;Do stop and have some
+      breakfast with us, it's just coming in. May I introduce my daughter, Lady
+      Moors and&mdash;and Lord Moors?&rdquo; The girl took my hand, and the young man
+      bowed from his place; but if that poor old man had known, peace was not to
+      be made so easily between two such bad-tempered women as Mrs. Thrall and
+      myself. We expressed some very stiff sentiments in regard to the weather,
+      and the prospect of the yacht getting off with the next tide, and my
+      husband joined in with that manly gentleness of his, but we did not sit
+      down, much less offer to stay to breakfast. We had got to the door of the
+      tent, the family following us, even to the noble son-in-law, and as she
+      now realized that we are actually going, Mrs. Thrall gasped out, &ldquo;But you
+      are not <i>leaving</i> us? What shall we <i>do</i> with all these
+      natives?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was again too much, and I flamed out at her. &ldquo;<i>Natives</i>! They
+      are cultivated and refined people, for they are Altrurians, and I assure
+      you you will be in much better hands than mine with them, for I am only
+      Altrurian by marriage!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was one of those leathery egotists that nothing will make a dint in,
+      and she came back with, &ldquo;But we don't speak the language, and they don't
+      speak English, and how are we to manage if the yacht doesn't get afloat?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no doubt you will be looked after from the capital we have just left.
+      But I will venture to make a little suggestion with regard to the natives
+      in the mean time. They are not proud, but they are very sensitive, and if
+      you fail in any point of consideration, they will understand that you do
+      not want their hospitality.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I imagine our own people will be able to look after us,&rdquo; she answered
+      quite as nastily. &ldquo;We do not propose to be dependent on them. We can pay
+      our way here as we do elsewhere.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The experiment will be worth trying,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Come, Aristides!&rdquo; and I
+      took the poor fellow away with me to our van. Mr. Thrall made some
+      hopeless little movements towards us, but I would not stop or even look
+      back. When we got into the van, I made Aristides put on the full power,
+      and fell back into my seat and cried a while, and then I scolded him
+      because he would not scold me, and went on in a really scandalous way. It
+      must have been a revelation to him, but he only smoothed me on the
+      shoulder and said, &ldquo;Poor Eveleth, poor Eveleth,&rdquo; till I thought I should
+      scream; but it ended in my falling on his neck, and saying I knew I was
+      horrid, and what did he want me to do?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After I calmed down into something like rationality, he said he thought we
+      had perhaps done the best thing we could for those people in leaving them
+      to themselves, for they could come to no possible harm among the
+      neighbors. He did not believe from what he had seen of the yacht from the
+      shore, and from what the Altrurians had told him, that there was one
+      chance in a thousand of her ever getting afloat. But those people would
+      have to convince themselves of the fact, and of several other facts in
+      their situation. I asked him what he meant, and he said he could tell me,
+      but that as yet it was a public affair, and he would rather not anticipate
+      the private interest I would feel in it. I did not insist; in fact, I
+      wanted to get that odious woman out of my mind as soon as I could, for the
+      thought of her threatened to poison the pleasure of the rest of our tour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I believe my husband hurried it a little, though he did not shorten it,
+      and we got back to the Maritime Region almost a week sooner than we had
+      first intended. I found my dear mother well, and still serenely happy in
+      her Altrurian surroundings. She had begun to learn the language, and she
+      had a larger acquaintance in the capital, I believe, than any other one
+      person. She said everybody had called on her, and they were the kindest
+      people she had ever dreamed of. She had exchanged cooking-lessons with one
+      lady who, they told her, was a distinguished scientist, and she had taught
+      another, who was a great painter, a peculiar embroidery stitch which she
+      had learned from my grandmother, and which everybody admired. These two
+      ladies had given her most of her grammatical instruction in Altrurian, but
+      there was a bright little girl who had enlarged her vocabulary more than
+      either, in helping her about her housework, the mother having lent her for
+      the purpose. My mother said she was not ashamed to make blunders before a
+      child, and the little witch had taken the greatest delight in telling her
+      the names of things in the house and the streets and the fields outside
+      the town, where they went long walks together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0040" id="link2H_4_0040">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      X
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Well, my dear Dorothea, I had been hoping to go more into detail about my
+      mother and about our life in the Maritime Capital, which is to be our home
+      for a year, but I had hardly got down the last words when Aristides came
+      in with a despatch from the Seventh Regionic, summoning us there on
+      important public business: I haven't got over the feeling yet of being
+      especially distinguished and flattered at sharing in public business; but
+      the Altrurian women are so used to it that they do not think anything of
+      it. The despatch was signed by an old friend of my husband's, Cyril
+      Chrysostom, who had once been Emissary in England, and to whom my husband
+      wrote his letters when he was in America. I hated to leave my mother so
+      soon, but it could not be helped, and we took the first electric express
+      for the Seventh Regionic, where we arrived in about an hour and forty
+      minutes, making the three hundred miles in that time easily. I couldn't
+      help regretting our comfortable van, but there was evidently haste in the
+      summons, and I confess that I was curious to know what the matter was,
+      though I had made a shrewd guess the first instant, and it turned out that
+      I was not mistaken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The long and the short of it was that there was trouble with the people
+      who had come ashore in that yacht, and were destined never to go to sea in
+      her. She was hopelessly bedded in the sand, and the waves that were
+      breaking over her were burying her deeper and deeper. The owners were
+      living in their tent as we had left them, and her crew were camped in
+      smaller tents and any shelter they could get, along the beach. They had
+      brought her stores away, but many of the provisions had been damaged, and
+      it had become a pressing question what should be done about the people. We
+      had been asked to consult with Cyril and his wife, and the other Regionic
+      chiefs and their wives, and we threshed the question out nearly the whole
+      night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am afraid it will appear rather comical in some aspects to you and Mr.
+      Makely, but I can assure you that it was a very serious matter with the
+      Altrurian authorities. If there had been any hope of a vessel from the
+      capitalistic world touching at Altruria within a definite time, they could
+      have managed, for they would have gladly kept the yacht's people and
+      owners till they could embark them for Australia or New Zealand, and would
+      have made as little of the trouble they were giving as they could. But
+      until the trader that brought us should return with the crew, as the
+      captain had promised, there was no ship expected, and any other wreck in
+      the mean time would only add to their difficulty. You may be surprised,
+      though I was not, that the difficulty was mostly with the yacht-owners,
+      and above all with Mrs. Thrall, who had baffled every effort of the
+      authorities to reduce what they considered the disorder of their life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the crew it was a different matter. As soon as they had got drunk on
+      the wines and spirits they had brought from the wreck, and then had got
+      sober because they had drunk all the liquors up, they began to be more
+      manageable; when their provisions ran short, and they were made to
+      understand that they would not be allowed to plunder the fields and woods,
+      or loot the villages for something to eat, they became almost exemplarily
+      docile. At first they were disposed to show fight, and the principles of
+      the Altrurians did not allow them to use violence in bringing them to
+      subjection; but the men had counted without their hosts in supposing that
+      they could therefore do as they pleased, unless they pleased to do right.
+      After they had made their first foray they were warned by Cyril, who came
+      from the capital to speak English with them, that another raid would not
+      be suffered. They therefore attempted it by night, but the Altrurians were
+      prepared for them with the flexible steel nets which are their only means
+      of defence, and half a dozen sailors were taken in one. When they
+      attempted to break out, and their shipmates attempted to break in to free
+      them, a light current of electricity was sent through the wires and the
+      thing was done. Those who were rescued&mdash;the Altrurians will not say
+      captured&mdash;had hoes put into their hands the next morning, and were
+      led into the fields and set to work, after a generous breakfast of coffee,
+      bread, and mushrooms. The chickens they had killed in their midnight
+      expedition were buried, and those which they had not killed lost no time
+      in beginning to lay eggs for the sustenance of the reformed castaways. As
+      an extra precaution with the &ldquo;rescued,&rdquo; when they were put to work, each
+      of them with a kind of shirt of mail, worn over his coat, which could
+      easily be electrized by a metallic filament connecting with the communal
+      dynamo, and under these conditions they each did a full day's work during
+      the Obligatories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the short commons grew shorter and shorter, both meat and drink, at
+      Camp Famine, and the campers found it was useless to attempt thieving from
+      the Altrurians, they had tried begging from the owners in their large
+      tent, but they were told that the provisions were giving out there, too,
+      and there was nothing for them. When they insisted the servants of the
+      owners had threatened them with revolvers, and the sailors, who had
+      nothing but their knives, preferred to attempt living on the country.
+      Within a week the whole crew had been put to work in the woods and fields
+      and quarries, or wherever they could make themselves useful. They were, on
+      the whole, so well fed and sheltered that they were perfectly satisfied,
+      and went down with the Altrurians on the beach during the Voluntaries and
+      helped secure the yacht's boats and pieces of wreckage that came ashore.
+      Until they became accustomed or resigned to the Altrurian diet, they were
+      allowed to catch shell-fish and the crabs that swarmed along the sand and
+      cook them, but on condition that they built their fires on the beach, and
+      cooked only during an offshore wind, so that the fumes of the roasting
+      should not offend the villagers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cyril acknowledged, therefore, that the question of the crew was for the
+      present practically settled, but Mr. and Mrs. Thrall, and their daughter
+      and son-in-law, with their servants, still presented a formidable problem.
+      As yet, their provisions had not run out, and they were living in their
+      marquee as we had seen them three weeks earlier, just after their yacht
+      went ashore. It could not be said that they were molestive in the same
+      sense as the sailors, but they were even more demoralizing in the
+      spectacle they offered the neighborhood of people dependent on hired
+      service, and in their endeavors to supply themselves in perishable
+      provisions, like milk and eggs, by means of money. Cyril had held several
+      interviews with them, in which he had at first delicately intimated, and
+      then explicitly declared, that the situation could not be prolonged. The
+      two men had been able to get the Altrurian point of view in some measure,
+      and so had Lady Moors, but Mrs. Thrall had remained stiffly obtuse and
+      obstinate, and it was in despair of bringing her to terms without
+      resorting to rescue that he had summoned us to help him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not a pleasant job, but of course we could not refuse, and we
+      agreed that as soon as we had caught a nap, and had a bite of breakfast we
+      would go over to their camp with Cyril and his wife, and see what we could
+      do with the obnoxious woman. I confess that I had some little consolation
+      in the hope that I should see her properly humbled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0041" id="link2H_4_0041">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Thrall and Lord Moors must have seen us coming, for they met us at the
+      door of the tent without the intervention of the footman, and gave us
+      quite as much welcome as we could expect in our mission, so disagreeable
+      all round. Mr. Thrall was as fatherly with me as before, and Lord Moors
+      was as polite to Cyril and Mrs. Chrysostom as could have been wished. In
+      fact he and Cyril were a sort of acquaintances from the time of Cyril's
+      visit to England where he met the late Earl Moors, the father of the
+      present peer, in some of his visits to Toynbee Hall, and the Whitechapel
+      Settlements. The earl was very much interested in the slums, perhaps
+      because he was rather poor himself, if not quite slummy. The son was then
+      at the university, and when he came out and into his title he so far
+      shared his father's tastes that he came to America; it was not slumming,
+      exactly, but a nobleman no doubt feels it to be something like it. After a
+      little while in New York he went out to Colorado, where so many needy
+      noblemen bring up, and there he met the Thralls, and fell in love with the
+      girl. Cyril had understood&mdash;or rather Mrs. Cyril,&mdash;that it was a
+      love-match on both sides, but on Mrs. Thrall's side it was business. He
+      did not even speak of settlements&mdash;the English are so romantic when
+      they <i>are</i> romantic!&mdash;but Mr. Thrall saw to all that, and the
+      young people were married after a very short courtship. They spent their
+      honeymoon partly in Colorado Springs and partly in San Francisco, where
+      the Thralls' yacht was lying, and then they set out on a voyage round the
+      world, making stops at the interesting places, and bringing up on the
+      beach of the Seventh Region of Altruria, on route for the eastern coast of
+      South America. From that time on, Cyril said, we knew their history.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After Mr. Thrall had shaken hands tenderly with me, and cordially with
+      Aristides, he said, &ldquo;Won't you all come inside and have breakfast with us?
+      My wife and daughter&rdquo;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you, Mr. Thrall,&rdquo; Cyril answered for us, &ldquo;we will sit down here, if
+      you please; and as your ladies are not used to business, we will not ask
+      you to disturb them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sure Lady Moors,&rdquo; the young nobleman began, but Cyril waved him
+      silent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We shall be glad later, but not now! Gentlemen, I have asked my friends
+      Aristides Homos and Eveleth Homos to accompany my wife and me this morning
+      because Eveleth is an American, and will understand your position, and he
+      has lately been in America and will be able to clarify the situation from
+      both sides. We wish you to believe that we are approaching you in the
+      friendliest spirit, and that nothing could be more painful to us than to
+      seem inhospitable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then why,&rdquo; the old man asked, with business-like promptness, &ldquo;do you
+      object to our presence here? I don't believe I get your idea.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because the spectacle which your life offers is contrary to good morals,
+      and as faithful citizens we cannot countenance it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But in what way is our life immoral? I have always thought that I was a
+      good citizen at home; at least I can't remember having been arrested for
+      disorderly conduct.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled at me, as if I should appreciate the joke, and it hurt me to
+      keep grave, but suspecting what a bad time he was going to have, I thought
+      I had better not join him in any levity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I quite conceive you,&rdquo; Cyril replied. &ldquo;But you present to our people, who
+      are offended by it, the spectacle of dependence upon hireling service for
+      your daily comfort and convenience.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, my dear sir,&rdquo; Mr. Thrall returned, &ldquo;don't we <i>pay</i> for it? Do
+      our servants object to rendering us this service?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That has nothing to do with the case; or, rather, it makes it worse. The
+      fact that your servants do not object shows how completely they are
+      depraved by usage. We should not object if they served you from affection,
+      and if you repaid them in kindness; but the fact that you think you have
+      made them a due return by giving them money shows how far from the right
+      ideal in such a matter the whole capitalistic world is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, to my great delight, Aristides spoke up:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If the American practice were half as depraving as it ought logically to
+      be in their conditions, their social system would drop to pieces. It was
+      always astonishing to me that a people with their facilities for evil,
+      their difficulties for good, should remain so kind and just and pure.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is what I understood from your letters to me, my dear Aristides. I
+      am willing to leave the general argument for the present. But I should
+      like to ask Mr. Thrall a question, and I hope it won't be offensive.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Thrall smiled. &ldquo;At any rate I promise not to be offended.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a very rich man?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Much richer than I would like to be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How rich?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Seventy millions; eighty; a hundred; three hundred; I don't just know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't suppose you've always felt your great wealth a great blessing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A blessing? There have been times when I felt it a millstone hanged about
+      my neck, and could have wished nothing so much as that I were thrown into
+      the sea. Man, you don't <i>know</i> what a curse I have felt my money to
+      be at such times. When I have given it away, as I have by millions at a
+      time, I have never been sure that I was not doing more harm than good with
+      it. I have hired men to seek out good objects for me, and I have tried my
+      best to find for myself causes and institutions and persons who might be
+      helped without hindering others as worthy, but sometimes it seems as if
+      every dollar of my money carried a blight with it, and infected whoever
+      touched it with a moral pestilence. It has reached a sum where the wildest
+      profligate couldn't spend it, and it grows and grows. It's as if it were a
+      rising flood that had touched my lips, and would go over my head before I
+      could reach the shore. I believe I got it honestly, and I have tried to
+      share it with those whose labor earned it for me. I have founded schools
+      and hospitals and homes for old men and old women, and asylums for
+      children, and the blind, and deaf, and dumb, and halt, and mad. Wherever I
+      have found one of my old workmen in need, and I have looked personally
+      into the matter, I have provided for him fully, short of pauperization.
+      Where I have heard of some gifted youth, I have had him educated in the
+      line of his gift. I have collected a gallery of works of art, and opened
+      it on Sundays as well as week-days to the public free. If there is a story
+      of famine, far or near, I send food by the shipload. If there is any great
+      public calamity, my agents have instructions to come to the rescue without
+      referring the case to me. But it is all useless! The money grows and
+      grows, and I begin to feel that my efforts to employ it wisely and
+      wholesomely are making me a public laughing-stock as well as an easy mark
+      for every swindler with a job or a scheme.&rdquo; He turned abruptly to me. &ldquo;But
+      you must often have heard the same from my old friend Strange. We used to
+      talk these things over together, when our money was not the heap that mine
+      is now; and it seems to me I can hear his voice saying the very words I
+      have been using.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I, too, seemed to hear his voice in the words, and it was as if speaking
+      from his grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked at Aristides, and read compassion in his dear face; but the face
+      of Cyril remained severe and judicial. He said: &ldquo;Then, if what you say is
+      true, you cannot think it a hardship if we remove your burden for the time
+      you remain with us. I have consulted with the National and Regional as
+      well as the Communal authorities, and we cannot let you continue to live
+      in the manner you are living here. You must pay your way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall be only too glad to do that,&rdquo; Mr. Thrall returned, more
+      cheerfully. &ldquo;We have not a great deal of cash in hand, but I can give you
+      my check on London or Paris or New York.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In Altruria,&rdquo; Cyril returned, &ldquo;we have no use for money. You must <i>pay</i>
+      your way as soon as your present provision from your yacht is exhausted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Thrall turned a dazed look on the young lord, who suggested: &ldquo;I don't
+      think we follow you. How can Mr. Thrall pay his way except with money?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He must pay with <i>work</i>. As soon as you come upon the neighbors here
+      for the necessities of life you must all work. To-morrow or the next day
+      or next week at the furthest you must go to work, or you must starve.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he came out with that text of Scripture which had been so efficient
+      with the crew of the <i>Little Sally</i>: &ldquo;For even when we were with you
+      this we commanded you, that if any would not work neither should he eat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Moors seemed very interested, and not so much surprised as I had
+      expected. &ldquo;Yes, I have often thought of that passage and of its
+      susceptibility to a simpler interpretation than we usually give it. But&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is but one interpretation of which it is susceptible,&rdquo; Cyril
+      interrupted. &ldquo;The apostle gives that interpretation when he prefaces the
+      text with the words, 'For yourselves know how you ought to follow us; for
+      we behaved not ourselves disorderly among you. Neither did we eat any
+      man's bread for nought; but <i>wrought with travail</i> night and day,
+      that we might not be chargeable to any of you: not because we have not
+      power, but to make ourselves an ensample unto you to follow us.' The whole
+      economy of Altruria is founded on these passages.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Literally?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Literally.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, my dear sir,&rdquo; the young lord reasoned, &ldquo;you surely do not wrench the
+      text from some such meaning as that if a man has money, he may pay his way
+      without working?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, certainly not. But here you have no money, and as we cannot suffer
+      any to 'walk among us disorderly, working not at all,' we must not exempt
+      you from our rule.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0042" id="link2H_4_0042">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      At this point there came a sound from within the marquee as of skirts
+      sweeping forward sharply, imperiously, followed by a softer <i>frou-frou</i>,
+      and Mrs. Thrall put aside the curtain of the tent with one hand, and stood
+      challenging our little Altrurian group, while Lady Moors peered timidly at
+      us from over her mother's shoulder. I felt a lust of battle rising in me
+      at sight of that woman, and it was as much as I could do to control
+      myself; but in view of the bad time I knew she was going to have, I
+      managed to hold in, though I joined very scantly in the polite greetings
+      of the Chrysostoms and Aristides, which she ignored as if they had been
+      the salutations of savages. She glared at her husband for explanation, and
+      he said, gently, &ldquo;This is a delegation from the Altrurian capital, my
+      dear, and we have been talking over the situation together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what is this,&rdquo; she demanded, &ldquo;that I have heard about our not paying?
+      Do they accuse us of not paying? You could buy and sell the whole
+      country.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I never imagined so much mildness could be put into such offensive words
+      as Cyril managed to get into his answer. &ldquo;We accuse you of not paying, and
+      we do not mean that you shall become chargeable to us. The men and women
+      who served you on shipboard have been put to work, and you must go to
+      work, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Thrall&mdash;Lord Moors&mdash;have you allowed these people to treat
+      you as if you were part of the ship's crew? Why don't you give them what
+      they want and let them go? Of course it's some sort of blackmailing
+      scheme. But you ought to get rid of them at any cost. Then you can appeal
+      to the authorities, and tell them that you will bring the matter to the
+      notice of the government at Washington. They must be taught that they
+      cannot insult American citizens with impunity.&rdquo; No one spoke, and she
+      added, &ldquo;What do they really want?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, my dear,&rdquo; her husband hesitated, &ldquo;I hardly know how to explain. But
+      it seems that they think our living here in the way we do is orderly, and&mdash;and
+      they want us to go to work, in short.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To <i>work!</i>&rdquo; she shouted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, all of us. That is, so I understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What nonsense!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at us one after another, and when her eye rested on me, I began
+      to suspect that insolent as she was she was even duller; in fact, that she
+      was so sodden in her conceit of wealth that she was plain stupid. So when
+      she said to me, &ldquo;You are an American by birth, I believe. Can you tell me
+      the meaning of this?&rdquo; I answered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cyril Chrysostom represents the authorities. If <i>he</i> asks me to
+      speak, I will speak.&rdquo; Cyril nodded at me with a smile, and I went on. &ldquo;It
+      is a very simple matter. In Altruria everybody works with his hands three
+      hours a day. After that he works or not, as he likes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have we to do with that?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The rule has no exceptions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But we are not Altrurians; we are Americans.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am an American, too, and I work three hours every day, unless I am
+      passing from one point to another on public business with my husband. Even
+      then we prefer to stop during the work-hours, and help in the fields, or
+      in the shops, or wherever we are needed. I left my own mother at home
+      doing her kitchen work yesterday afternoon, though it was out of hours,
+      and she need not have worked.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well, then, we will do nothing of the kind, neither I, nor my
+      daughter, nor my husband. He has worked hard all his life, and he has come
+      away for a much-needed rest. I am not going to have him breaking himself
+      down.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I could not help suggesting, &ldquo;I suppose the men at work in his mines, and
+      mills, and on his railroads and steamship lines are taking a much-needed
+      rest, too. I hope you are not going to let them break themselves down,
+      either.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Aristides gave me a pained glance, and Cyril and his wife looked grave,
+      but she not quite so grave as he. Lord Moors said, &ldquo;We don't seem to be
+      getting on. What Mrs. Thrall fails to see, and I confess I don't quite see
+      it myself, is that if we are not here <i>in forma pauperis</i>&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you <i>are</i> here <i>in forma pauperis</i>,&rdquo; Cyril interposed,
+      smilingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How is that? If we are willing to pay&mdash;if Mr. Thrall's credit is
+      undeniably good&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Thrall's credit is not good in Altruria; you can pay here only in one
+      currency, in the sweat of your faces.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You want us to be Tolstoys, I suppose,&rdquo; Mrs. Thrall said, contemptuously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cyril replied, gently, &ldquo;The endeavor of Tolstoy, in capitalistic
+      conditions, is necessarily dramatic. Your labor here will be for your
+      daily bread, and it will be real.&rdquo; The inner dullness of the woman came
+      into her eyes again, and he addressed himself to Lord Moors in continuing:
+      &ldquo;If a company of indigent people were cast away on an English coast, after
+      you had rendered them the first aid, what should you do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man reflected. &ldquo;I suppose we should put them in the way of
+      earning a living until some ship arrived to take them home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is merely what we propose to do in your case here,&rdquo; Cyril said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But we are not indigent&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you are absolutely destitute. You have money and credit, but neither
+      has any value in Altruria. Nothing but work or love has any value in
+      Altruria. You cannot realize too clearly that you stand before us <i>in
+      forma pauperis</i>. But we require of you nothing that we do not require
+      of ourselves. In Altruria every one is poor till he pays with work; then,
+      for that time, he is rich; and he cannot otherwise lift himself above
+      charity, which, except in the case of the helpless, we consider immoral.
+      Your life here offers a very corrupting spectacle. You are manifestly
+      living without work, and you are served by people whose hire you are not
+      able to pay.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear sir,&rdquo; Mr. Thrall said at this point, with a gentle smile, &ldquo;I
+      think they are willing to take the chances of being paid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We cannot suffer them to do so. At present we know of no means of your
+      getting away from Altruria. We have disused our custom of annually
+      connecting with the Australasian steamers, and it may be years before a
+      vessel touches on our coast. A ship sailed for Boston some months ago,
+      with the promise of returning in order that the crew may cast in their lot
+      with us permanently. We do not confide in that promise, and you must
+      therefore conform to our rule of life. Understand clearly that the
+      willingness of your servants to serve you has nothing to do with the
+      matter. That is part of the falsity in which the whole capitalistic world
+      lives. As the matter stands with you, here, there is as much reason why
+      you should serve them as they should serve you. If on their side they
+      should elect to serve you from love, they will be allowed to do so.
+      Otherwise, you and they must go to work with the neighbors at the tasks
+      they will assign you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean at once?&rdquo; Lord Moors asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The hours of the obligatory labors are nearly past for the day. But if
+      you are interested in learning what you will be set to doing to-morrow,
+      the Communal authorities will be pleased to instruct you during the
+      Voluntaries this afternoon. You may be sure that in no case will your
+      weakness or inexperience be overtasked. Your histories will be studied,
+      and appropriate work will be assigned to each of you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Thrall burst out, &ldquo;If you think I am going into my kitchen&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I burst in, &ldquo;I left my mother in <i>her</i> kitchen!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And a very fit place for her, I dare say,&rdquo; she retorted, but Lady Moors
+      caught her mother's arm and murmured, in much the same distress as showed
+      in my husband's mild eyes, &ldquo;Mother! Mother!&rdquo; and drew her within.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0043" id="link2H_4_0043">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Well, Dolly, I suppose you will think it was pretty hard for those people,
+      and when I got over my temper I confess that I felt sorry for the two men,
+      and for the young girl whom the Altrurians would not call Lady Moors, but
+      addressed by her Christian name, as they did each of the American party in
+      his or her turn; even Mrs. Thrall had to answer to Rebecca. They were all
+      rather bewildered, and so were the butler and the footmen, and the <i>chef</i>
+      and his helpers, and the ladies' maids. These were even more shocked than
+      those they considered their betters, and I quite took to my affections
+      Lord Moors' man Robert, who was in an awe-stricken way trying to get some
+      light from me on the situation. He contributed as much as any one to bring
+      about a peaceful submission to the inevitable, for he had been a near
+      witness of what had happened to the crew when they attempted their
+      rebellion to the authorities; but he did not profess to understand the
+      matter, and from time to time he seemed to question the reality of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two masters, as you would call Mr. Thrall and Lord Moors, both took an
+      attitude of amiable curiosity towards their fate, and accepted it with
+      interest when they had partly chosen and partly been chosen by it. Mr.
+      Thrall had been brought up on a farm till his ambition carried him into
+      the world; and he found the light gardening assigned him for his first
+      task by no means a hardship. He was rather critical of the Altrurian style
+      of hoe at first, but after he got the hang of it, as he said, he liked it
+      better, and during the three hours of the first morning's Obligatoires,
+      his ardor to cut all the weeds out at once had to be restrained rather
+      than prompted. He could not be persuaded to take five minutes for rest out
+      of every twenty, and he could not get over his life-long habit of working
+      against time. The Altrurians tried to make him understand that here people
+      must not work <i>against</i> time, but must always work <i>with</i> it, so
+      as to have enough work to do each day; otherwise they must remain idle
+      during the Obligatoires and tend to demoralize the workers. It seemed that
+      Lady Moors had a passion for gardening, and she was set to work with her
+      father on the border of flowers surrounding the vegetable patch he was
+      hoeing. She knew about flowers, and from her childhood had amused herself
+      by growing them, and so far from thinking it a hardship or disgrace to
+      dig, she was delighted to get at them. It was easy to see that she and her
+      father were cronies, and when I went round in the morning with Aristides
+      to ask if we could do anything for them, we heard them laughing and
+      talking gayly together before we reached them. They said they had looked
+      their job (as Mr. Thrall called it) over the afternoon before during the
+      Voluntaries, and had decided how they would manage, and they had set to
+      work that morning as soon as they had breakfast. Lady Moors had helped her
+      mother get the breakfast, and she seemed to regard the whole affair as a
+      picnic, though from the look of Mrs. Thrall's back, as she turned it on
+      me, when I saw her coming to the door of the marquee with a coffee-pot in
+      her hand, I decided that she was not yet resigned to her new lot in life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Moors was nowhere to be seen, and I felt some little curiosity about
+      him which was not quite anxiety. Later, as we were going back to our
+      quarters in the village, we saw him working on the road with a party of
+      Altrurians who were repairing a washout from an overnight rain. They were
+      having all kinds of a time, except a bad time, trying to understand each
+      other in their want of a common language. It appeared that the Altrurians
+      were impressed with his knowledge of road-making, and were doing something
+      which he had indicated to them by signs. We offered our services as
+      interpreters, and then he modestly owned in defence of his suggestions
+      that when he was at Oxford he had been one of the band of enthusiastic
+      undergraduates who had built a piece of highway under Mr. Ruskin's
+      direction. The Altrurians regarded his suggestions as rather amateurish,
+      but they were glad to act upon them, when they could, out of pure good
+      feeling and liking for him; and from time to time they rushed upon him and
+      shook hands with him; their affection did not go further, and he was able
+      to stand the handshaking, though he told us he hoped they would not feel
+      it necessary to keep it up, for it was really only a very simple matter
+      like putting a culvert in place of a sluice which they had been using to
+      carry the water off. They understood what he was saying, from his
+      gestures, and they crowded round us to ask whether he would like to join
+      them during the Voluntaries that afternoon, in getting the stone out of a
+      neighboring quarry, and putting in the culvert at once. We explained to
+      him, and he said he should be very happy. All the time he was looking at
+      them admirably, and he said, &ldquo;It's really very good,&rdquo; and we understood
+      that he meant their classic working-dress, and when he added, &ldquo;I should
+      really fancy trying it myself one day,&rdquo; and we told them they wanted to go
+      and bring him an Altrurian costume at once. But we persuaded them not to
+      urge him, and in fact he looked very fit for his work in his yachting
+      flannels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I talked him over a long time with Aristides, and tried to get his point
+      of view. I decided finally that an Englishman of his ancient lineage and
+      high breeding, having voluntarily come down to the level of an American
+      millionaire by marriage, could not feel that he was lowering himself any
+      further by working with his hands. In fact, he probably felt that his
+      merely undertaking a thing dignified the thing; but of course this was
+      only speculation on my part, and he may have been resigned to working for
+      a living because like poor people elsewhere he was obliged to do it.
+      Aristides thought there was a good deal in that idea, but it is hard for
+      an Altrurian to conceive of being ashamed of work, for they regard
+      idleness as pauperism, and they would look upon our leisure classes, so
+      far as we have them, very much as we look upon tramps, only they would
+      make the excuse for our tramps that they often cannot get work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had far more trouble with the servants than we had with the masters in
+      making them understand that they were to go to work in the fields and
+      shops, quite as the crew of the yacht had done. Some of them refused
+      outright, and stuck to their refusal until the village electrician rescued
+      them with the sort of net and electric filament which had been employed
+      with the recalcitrant sailors; others were brought to a better mind by
+      withholding food from them till they were willing to pay for it by
+      working. You will be sorry to learn, Dolly, that the worst of the rebels
+      were the ladies' maids, who, for the honor of our sex, ought not to have
+      required the application of the net and filament; but they had not such
+      appetites as the men-servants, and did not mind starving so much. However,
+      in a very short time they were at work, too, and more or less resigned,
+      though they did not profess to understand it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You will think me rather fickle, I am afraid, but after I made the
+      personal acquaintance of Mr. Thrall's <i>chef,</i> Anatole, I found my
+      affections dividing themselves between him and his lordship's man Robert,
+      my first love. But Anatole was magnificent, a gaunt, little, aquiline man,
+      with a branching mustache and gallant goatee, and having held an exalted
+      position at a salary of ten thousand a year from Mr. Thrall, he could
+      easily stoop from it, while poor Robert was tormented with misgivings, not
+      for himself, but for Lord and Lady Moors and Mr. Thrall. It became my
+      pleasing office to explain the situation to Monsieur Anatole, who, when he
+      imagined it, gave a cry of joy, and confessed, what he had never liked to
+      tell Mr. Thrall, knowing the misconceptions of Americans on the subject,
+      that he had belonged in France to a party of which the political and
+      social ideal was almost identical with that of the Altrurians. He asked
+      for an early opportunity of addressing the village Assembly and explaining
+      this delightful circumstance in public, and he profited by the occasion to
+      embrace the first Altrurian we met and kiss him on both cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His victim was a messenger from the Commune, who had been sent to inquire
+      whether Anatole had a preference as to the employment which should be
+      assigned to him, and I had to reply for him that he was a man of science;
+      that he would be happy to serve the republic in whatever capacity his
+      concitizens chose, but that he thought he could be most useful in studying
+      the comestible vegetation of the neighborhood, and the substitution of the
+      more succulent herbs for the flesh-meats to the use of which, he
+      understood from me, the Altrurians were opposed. In the course of his
+      preparation for the rôle of <i>chef</i>, which he had played both in
+      France and America, he had made a specialty of edible fungi; and the
+      result was that Anatole was set to mushrooming, and up to this moment he
+      has discovered no less than six species hitherto unknown to the Altrurian
+      table. This has added to their dietary in several important particulars,
+      the fungi he has discovered being among those highly decorative and
+      extremely poisonous-looking sorts which flourish in the deep woods and
+      offer themselves almost inexhaustibly in places near the ruins of the old
+      capitalistic cities, where hardly any other foods will grow. Anatole is
+      very proud of his success, and at more than one Communal Assembly has
+      lectured upon his discoveries and treated of their preparation for the
+      table, with sketches of them as he found them growing, colored after
+      nature by his own hand. He has himself become a fanatical vegetarian,
+      having, he confesses, always had a secret loathing for the meats he
+      stooped to direct the cooking of among the French and American bourgeoisie
+      in the days which he already looks back upon as among the most benighted
+      of his history.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0044" id="link2H_4_0044">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The scene has changed again, Dolly, and six months have elapsed without
+      your knowing it. Aristides and I long ago completed the tour of the
+      capitals which the Thrall incident interrupted, and we have been settled
+      for many months in the Maritime Capital, where it has been decided we had
+      better fill out the first two years of my husband's repatriation. I have
+      become more and more thoroughly naturalized, and if I am not yet a perfect
+      Altrurian, it is not for not loving better and better the best Altrurian
+      of them all, and not for not admiring and revering this wonderful
+      civilization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the Obligatories of the forenoons I do my housework with my own
+      hands, and as my mother lives with us we have long talks together, and try
+      to make each other believe that the American conditions were a sort of
+      nightmare from which we have happily awakened. You see how terribly frank
+      I am, my dear, but if I were not, I could not make you understand how I
+      feel. My heart aches for you, there, and the more because I know that you
+      do not want to live differently, that you are proud of your economic and
+      social illogicality, and that you think America is the best country under
+      the sun! I can never persuade you, but if you could only come here, once,
+      and see for yourselves! Seeing would be believing, and believing would be
+      the wish never to go away, but to be at home here always.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I can imagine your laughing at me and asking Mr. Makely whether the <i>Little
+      Sally</i> has ever returned to Altruria, and how I can account for the
+      captain's failure to keep his word. I confess that is a sore point with
+      me. It is now more than a year since she sailed, and, of course, we have
+      not had a sign or whisper from her. I could almost wish that the crew were
+      willing to stay away, but I am afraid it is the captain who is keeping
+      them. It has become almost a mania with me, and every morning, the first
+      thing when I wake, I go for my before-breakfast walk along the marble
+      terrace that overlooks the sea, and scan the empty rounding for the
+      recreant ship. I do not want to think so badly of human nature, as I must
+      if the <i>Little Sally</i> never comes back, and I am sure you will not
+      blame me if I should like her to bring me some word from you. I know that
+      if she ever reached Boston you got my letters and presents, and that you
+      have been writing me as faithfully as I have been writing you, and what a
+      sheaf of letters from you there will be if her masts ever pierce the
+      horizon! To tell the truth, I do long for a little American news! Do you
+      still keep on murdering and divorcing, and drowning, and burning, and
+      mommicking, and maiming people by sea and land? Has there been any war
+      since I left? Is the financial panic as great as ever, and is there as
+      much hunger and cold? I know that whatever your crimes and calamities are,
+      your heroism and martyrdom, your wild generosity and self-devotion, are
+      equal to them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is no use to pretend that in little over a year I can have become
+      accustomed to the eventlessness of life in Altruria. I go on for a good
+      many days together and do not miss the exciting incidents you have in
+      America, and then suddenly I am wolfishly hungry for the old sensations,
+      just as now and then I <i>want meat</i>, though I know I should loathe the
+      sight and smell of it if I came within reach of it. You would laugh, I
+      dare say, at the Altrurian papers, and what they print for news. Most of
+      the space is taken up with poetry, and character study in the form of
+      fiction, and scientific inquiry of every kind. But now and then there is a
+      report of the production of a new play in one of the capitals; or an
+      account of an open-air pastoral in one of the communes; or the progress of
+      some public work, like the extension of the National Colonnade; or the
+      wonderful liberation of some section from malaria; or the story of some
+      good man or woman's life, ended at the patriarchal age they reach here.
+      They also print selected passages of capitalistic history, from the
+      earliest to the latest times, showing how in war and pestilence and
+      needless disaster the world outside Altruria remains essentially the same
+      that it was at the beginning of civilization, with some slight changes
+      through the changes of human nature for the better in its slow approaches
+      to the Altrurian ideal. In noting these changes the writers get some sad
+      amusement out of the fact that the capitalistic world believes human
+      nature cannot be changed, though cannibalism and slavery and polygamy have
+      all been extirpated in the so-called Christian countries, and these things
+      were once human nature, which is always changing, while brute nature
+      remains the same. Now and then they touch very guardedly on that slavery,
+      worse than war, worse than any sin or shame conceivable to the Altrurians,
+      in which uncounted myriads of women are held and bought and sold, and they
+      have to note that in this the capitalistic world is without the hope of
+      better things. You know what I mean, Dolly; every good woman knows the
+      little she cannot help knowing; but if you had ever inquired into that
+      horror, as I once felt obliged to do, you would think it the blackest
+      horror of the state of things where it must always exist as long as there
+      are riches and poverty. Now, when so many things in America seem bad
+      dreams, I cannot take refuge in thinking that a bad dream; the reality was
+      so deeply burnt into my brain by the words of some of the slaves; and when
+      I think of it I want to grovel on the ground with my mouth in the dust.
+      But I know this can only distress you, for you cannot get away from the
+      fact as I have got away from it; that there it is in the next street,
+      perhaps in the next house, and that any night when you leave your home
+      with your husband, you may meet it at the first step from your door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You can very well imagine what a godsend the reports of Aristides and the
+      discussions of them have been to our papers. They were always taken down
+      stenographically, and they were printed like dialogue, so that at a little
+      distance you would take them at first for murder trials or divorce cases,
+      but when you look closer, you find them questions and answers about the
+      state of things in America. There are often humorous passages, for the
+      Altrurians are inextinguishably amused by our illogicality, and what they
+      call the perpetual <i>non sequiturs</i> of our lives and laws. In the
+      discussions they frequently burlesque these, but as they present them they
+      seem really beyond the wildest burlesque. Perhaps you will be surprised to
+      know that a nation of working-people like these feel more compassion than
+      admiration for our working-people. They pity them, but they blame them
+      more than they blame the idle rich for the existing condition of things in
+      America. They ask why, if the American workmen are in the immense
+      majority, they do not vote a true and just state, and why they go on
+      striking and starving their families instead; they cannot distinguish in
+      principle between the confederations of labor and the combinations of
+      capital, between the trusts and the trades-unions, and they condemn even
+      more severely the oppressions and abuses of the unions. My husband tries
+      to explain that the unions are merely provisional, and are a temporary
+      means of enabling the employees to stand up against the tyranny of the
+      employers, but they always come back and ask him if the workmen have not
+      most of the votes, and if they have, why they do not protect themselves
+      peacefully instead of organizing themselves in fighting shape, and making
+      a warfare of industry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is not often anything so much like news in the Altrurian papers as
+      the grounding of the Thrall yacht on the coast of the Seventh Region, and
+      the incident has been treated and discussed in every possible phase by the
+      editors and their correspondents. They have been very frank about it, as
+      they are about everything in Altruria, and they have not concealed their
+      anxieties about their unwelcome guests. They got on without much trouble
+      in the case of the few sailors of the <i>Little Sally</i>, but the crew of
+      the <i>Saraband</i> is so large that it is a different matter. In the
+      first place, they do not like the application of force, even in the mild
+      electrical form in which they employ it, and they fear that the effect
+      with themselves will be bad, however good it is for their guests. Besides,
+      they dread the influence which a number of people, invested with the charm
+      of strangeness, may have with the young men and especially the young girls
+      of the neighborhood. The hardest thing the Altrurians have to grapple with
+      is feminine curiosity, and the play of this about the strangers is what
+      they seek the most anxiously to control. Of course, you will think it
+      funny, and I must say that it seemed so to me at first, but I have come to
+      think it is serious. The Altrurian girls are cultivated and refined, but
+      as they have worked all their lives with their hands they cannot imagine
+      the difference that work makes in Americans; that it coarsens and classes
+      them, especially if they have been in immediate contact with rich people,
+      and been degraded or brutalized by the knowledge of the contempt in which
+      labor is held among us by those who are not compelled to it. Some of my
+      Altrurian friends have talked it over with me, and I could take their
+      point of view, though secretly I could not keep my poor American feelings
+      from being hurt when they said that to have a large number of people from
+      the capitalistic world thrown upon their hands was very much as it would
+      be with us if we had the same number of Indians, with all their tribal
+      customs and ideals, thrown upon our hands. They say they will not shirk
+      their duty in the matter, and will study it carefully; but all the same,
+      they wish the incident had not happened.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I am glad that I was called away from the disagreeable point I left in my
+      last, and that I have got back temporarily to the scene of the
+      Altrurianization of Mr. Thrall and his family. So far as it has gone it is
+      perfect, if I may speak from the witness of happiness in those concerned,
+      except perhaps Mrs. Thrall; she is as yet only partially reconstructed,
+      but even she has moments of forgetting her lost grandeur and of really
+      enjoying herself in her work. She is an excellent housekeeper, and she has
+      become so much interested in making the marquee a simple home for her
+      family that she is rather proud of showing it off as the effect of her
+      unaided efforts. She was allowed to cater to them from the canned meats
+      brought ashore from the yacht as long as they would stand it, but the
+      wholesome open-air conditions have worked a wonderful change in them, and
+      neither Mr. Thrall nor Lord and Lady Moors now have any taste for such
+      dishes. Here Mrs. Thrall's old-time skill as an excellent vegetable cook,
+      when she was the wife of a young mechanic, has come into play, and she
+      believes that she sets the best table in the whole neighborhood, with
+      fruits and many sorts of succulents and the everlasting and ever-pervading
+      mushrooms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the Altrurians do not wish to annoy their involuntary guests, or to
+      interfere with their way of life where they do not consider it immoral,
+      their control has ended with setting them to work for a living. They have
+      not asked them to the communal refectory, but, as long as they have been
+      content to serve each other, have allowed them their private table. Of
+      course, their adaptation to their new way of life has proceeded more
+      slowly than it otherwise would, but with the exception of Mrs. Thrall they
+      are very intelligent people, and I have been charmed in talking the
+      situation over with them. The trouble has not been so great with the
+      ship's people, as was feared. Such of these as have imagined their stay
+      here permanent, or wished it to be so, have been received into the
+      neighboring communes, and have taken the first steps towards
+      naturalization; those who look forward to getting away some time, or
+      express the wish for it, are allowed to live in a community of their own,
+      where they are not molested as long as they work in the three hours of the
+      Obligatoires. Naturally, they are kept out of mischief, but after their
+      first instruction in the ideas of public property and the impossibility of
+      enriching themselves at the expense of any one else, they have behaved
+      very well. The greatest trouble they ever gave was in trapping and killing
+      the wild things for food; but when they were told that this must not be
+      done, and taught to recognize the vast range of edible fungi, they took
+      not unwillingly to mushrooms and the ranker tubers and roots, from which,
+      with unlimited eggs, cheese, milk, and shell-fish, they have constructed a
+      diet of which they do not complain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This brings me rather tangentially to Monsieur Anatole, who has become a
+      fanatical Altrurian, and has even had to be restrained in some of his
+      enthusiastic plans for the compulsory naturalization of his fellow
+      castaways. His value as a scientist has been cordially recognized, and his
+      gifts as an artist in the exquisite water-color studies of edible fungi
+      has won his notice in the capital of the Seventh Regional where they have
+      been shown at the spring water-color exhibition. He has printed several
+      poems in the <i>Regional Gazette</i>, villanelles, rondeaux, and triolets,
+      with accompanying versions of the French, into Altrurian by one of the
+      first Altrurian poets. This is a widow of about Monsieur Anatole's own
+      age; and the literary friendship between them has ripened into something
+      much more serious. In fact they are engaged to be married. I suppose you
+      will laugh at this, Dolly, and at first I confess that there was enough of
+      the old American in me to be shocked at the idea of a French <i>chef</i>
+      marrying an Altrurian lady who could trace her descent to the first
+      Altrurian president of the Commonwealth, and who is universally loved and
+      honored. I could not help letting something of the kind escape me by
+      accident, to a friend, and presently Mrs. Chrysostom was sent to interview
+      me on the subject, and to learn just how the case appeared to me. This put
+      me on my honor, and I was obliged to say how it would appear in America,
+      though every moment I grew more and more ashamed of myself and my native
+      country, where we pretend that labor is honorable, and are always heaping
+      dishonor on it. I told how certain of our girls and matrons had married
+      their coachmen and riding-masters and put themselves at odds with society,
+      and I confessed that marrying a cook would be regarded as worse, if
+      possible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Chrysostom was accompanied by a lady in her second youth, very
+      graceful, very charmingly dressed, and with an expression of winning
+      intelligence, whom she named to me simply as Cecilia, in the Altrurian
+      fashion. She apparently knew no English, and at first Mrs. Chrysostom
+      translated each of her questions and my answers. When I had got through,
+      this lady began to question me herself in Altrurian, which I owned to
+      understanding a little. She said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know Anatole?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, certainly, and I like him, as I think every one must who knows him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is a skillful <i>chef</i>?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Thrall would not have paid him ten thousand dollars a year if he had
+      not been.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have seen some of his water-colors?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. They are exquisite. He is unquestionably an artist of rare talent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And it is known to you that he is a man of scientific attainments?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is something I cannot judge of so well as Aristides; but <i>he</i>
+      says M. Anatole is learned beyond any man he knows in edible fungi.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As an adoptive Altrurian, and knowing the American ideas from our point
+      of view, should you respect their ideas of social inequality?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not the least in the world. I understand as well as you do that their
+      ideas must prevail wherever one works for a living and another does not.
+      hose ideas are practically as much accepted in America as they are in
+      Europe, but I have fully renounced them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      You see, Dolly, how far I have gone!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The unknown, who could be pretty easily imagined, rose up and gave me her
+      hand. &ldquo;If you are in the Region on the third of May you must come to our
+      wedding.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The same afternoon I had a long talk with Mr. Thrall, whom I found at work
+      replanting a strawberry-patch during the Voluntaries. He rose up at the
+      sound of my voice, and after an old man's dim moment for getting me
+      mentally in focus, he brightened into a genial smile, and said, &ldquo;Oh, Mrs.
+      Homos! I am glad to see you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I told him to go on with his planting, and I offered to get down on my
+      knees beside him and help, but he gallantly handed me to a seat in the
+      shade beside his daughter's flower-bed, and it was there that we had a
+      long talk about conditions in America and Altruria, and how he felt about
+      the great change in his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I can truly say,&rdquo; he answered much more at length than I shall
+      report, &ldquo;that I have never been so happy since the first days of my
+      boyhood. All care has dropped from me; I don't feel myself rich, and I
+      don't feel myself poor in this perfect safety from want. The only thing
+      that gives me any regret is that my present state has not been the effect
+      of my own will and deed. If I am now following the greatest and truest of
+      all counsels it has not been because I have sold all and given to the
+      poor, but because my money has been mercifully taken from me, and I have
+      been released from its responsibilities in a state of things where there
+      is no money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, Mr. Thrall,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;don't you ever feel that you have a duty to
+      the immense fortune which you have left in America, and which must be
+      disposed of somehow when people are satisfied that you are not going to
+      return and dispose of it yourself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, none. I was long ago satisfied that I could really do no good with
+      it. Perhaps if I had had more faith in it I might have done some good with
+      it, but I believe that I never did anything but harm, even when I seemed
+      to be helping the most, for I was aiding in the perpetuation of a state of
+      things essentially wrong. Now, if I never go back&mdash;and I never wish
+      to go back&mdash;let the law dispose of it as seems best to the
+      authorities. I have no kith or kin, and my wife has none, so there is no
+      one to feel aggrieved by its application to public objects.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And how do you imagine it will be disposed of?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I suppose for charitable and educational purposes. Of course a good
+      deal of it will go in graft; but that cannot be helped.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if you could now dispose of it according to your clearest ideas of
+      justice, and if you were forced to make the disposition yourself, what
+      would you do with it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, that is something I have been thinking of, and as nearly as I can
+      make out, I ought to go into the records of my prosperity and ascertain
+      just how and when I made my money. Then I ought to seek out as fully as
+      possible the workmen who helped me make it by their labor. Their wages,
+      which, were always the highest, were never a fair share, though I forced
+      myself to think differently, and it should be my duty to inquire for them
+      and pay them each a fair share, or, if they are dead, then their children
+      or their next of kin. But even when I had done this I should not be sure
+      that I had not done them more harm than good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      How often I had heard poor Mr. Strange say things like this, and heard of
+      other rich men saying them, after lives of what is called beneficence! Mr.
+      Thrall drew a deep sigh, and cast a longing look at his strawberry-bed. I
+      laughed, and said, &ldquo;You are anxious to get back to your plants, and I
+      won't keep you. I wonder if Mrs. Thrall could see me if I called; or Lady
+      Moors?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He said he was sure they would, and I took my way over to the marquee. I
+      was a little surprised to be met at the door by Lord Moors' man Robert. He
+      told me he was very sorry, but her ladyship was helping his lordship at a
+      little job on the roads, which they were doing quite in the Voluntaries,
+      with the hope of having the National Colonnade extended to a given point;
+      the ladies were helping the gentlemen get the place in shape. He was still
+      sorrier, but I not so much, that Mrs. Thrall was lying down and would like
+      to be excused; she was rather tired from putting away the luncheon things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He asked me if I would not sit down, and he offered me one of the
+      camp-stools at the door of the marquee, and I did sit down for a moment,
+      while he flitted about the interior doing various little things. At last I
+      said, &ldquo;How is this, Robert? I thought you had been assigned to a place in
+      the communal refectory. You're not here on the old terms?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He came out and stood respectfully holding a dusting-cloth in his hand.
+      &ldquo;Thank you, not exactly, ma'am. But the fact is, ma'am, that the communal
+      monitors have allowed me to come back here a few hours in the afternoon,
+      on what I may call terms of my own.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't understand. But won't you sit down, Robert?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you, if it is the same to you, ma'am, I would rather stand while
+      I'm here. In the refectory, of course, it's different.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But about your own terms?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks. You see, ma'am, I've thought all along it was a bit awkward for
+      them here, they not being so much used to looking after things, and I
+      asked leave to come and help now and then. Of course, they said that I
+      could not be allowed to serve for hire in Altruria; and one thing led to
+      another, and I said it would really be a favor to me, and I didn't expect
+      money for my work, for I did not suppose I should ever be where I could
+      use it again, but if they would let me come here and do it for&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Robert stopped and blushed and looked down, and I took the word, &ldquo;For
+      love?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, ma'am, that's what they called it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dolly, it made the tears come into my eyes, and I said very solemnly,
+      &ldquo;Robert, do you know, I believe you are the sweetest soul even in this and
+      flowing with milk and honey?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you mustn't say that, ma'am. There's Mr. Thrall and his lordship and
+      her ladyship. I'm sure they would do the like for me if I needed their
+      help. And there are the Altrurians, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But they are used to it, Robert, and&mdash;Robert! Be frank with me! What
+      do you think of Altruria?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite frank, ma'am, as if you were not connected with it, as you are?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite frank.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, ma'am, if you are sure you wouldn't mind it, or consider it out of
+      the way for me, I should say it was&mdash;rum.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Rum</i>? Don't you think it is beautiful here, to see people living
+      for each other instead of living <i>on</i> each other, and the whole
+      nation like one family, and the country a paradise?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, that's just it, ma'am, if you won't mind my saying so. That's what
+      I mean by rum.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Won't you explain?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It doesn't seem <i>real</i>. Every night when I go to sleep, and think
+      that there isn't a thief or a policeman on the whole continent, and only a
+      few harmless homicides, as you call them, that wouldn't hurt a fly, and
+      not a person hungry or cold, and no poor and no rich, and no servants and
+      no masters, and no soldiers, and no&mdash;disreputable characters, it
+      seems as if I was going to wake up in the morning and find myself on the
+      <i>Saraband</i> and it all a dream here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Robert,&rdquo; I had to own, &ldquo;that was the way with me, too, for a long
+      while. And even now I have dreams about America and the way matters are
+      there, and I wake myself weeping for fear Altruria <i>isn't</i> true.
+      Robert! You must be honest with me! When you are awake, and it's broad
+      day, and you see how happy every one is here, either working or playing,
+      and the whole land without an ugly place in it, and the lovely villages
+      and the magnificent towns, and everything, does it still seem&mdash;rum?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's like that, ma'am, at times. I don't say at all times.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you don't believe that the rest of the world&mdash;England and
+      America&mdash;will ever be rum, too?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't see how they can. You see the poor are against it as well as the
+      rich. Everybody wants to have something of his own, and the trouble seems
+      to come from that. I don't suppose it was brought about in a day, Altruria
+      wasn't, ma'am?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, it was whole centuries coming.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was what I understood from that Mr. Chrysostom&mdash;Cyril, he wants
+      me to call him, but I can't quite make up my mouth to it&mdash;who speaks
+      English, and says he has been in England. He was telling me about it, one
+      day when we were drying the dishes at the refectory together. He says they
+      used to have wars and trusts and trades-unions here in the old days, just
+      as we do now in civilized countries.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you don't consider Altruria civilized?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, not in just that sense of the word, ma'am. You wouldn't call heaven
+      civilized?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, not in just that sense of the word. Robert.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see, it's rum here, because, though everything seems to go so right,
+      it's against human nature.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Altrurians say it isn't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope I don't differ from you, ma'am, but what would people&mdash;the
+      best people&mdash;at home say? They would say it wasn't reasonable; they
+      would say it wasn't even possible. That's what makes me think it's a dream&mdash;that
+      it's rum. Begging your pardon, ma'am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I quite understand, Robert. Then you don't believe a camel can ever
+      go through the eye of a needle?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't quite see how, ma'am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you are proof of as great a miracle, Robert.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Beg your pardon, ma'am?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some day I will explain. But is there nothing that can make you believe
+      Altruria is true here, and that it can be true anywhere?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been thinking a good deal about that, ma'am. One doesn't quite
+      like to go about in a dream, or think one is dreaming, and I have got to
+      saying to myself that if some ship was to come here from England or
+      America, or even from Germany, and we could compare our feelings with the
+      feelings of people who were fresh to it, we might somehow get to believe
+      that it was real.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I had to own. &ldquo;We need fresh proofs from time to time. There was a
+      ship that sailed from here something over a year ago, and the captain
+      promised his crew to let them bring her back, but at times I am afraid
+      that was part of the dream, too, and that we're all something I am
+      dreaming about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just so, ma'am,&rdquo; Robert said, and I came away downhearted enough, though
+      he called after me, &ldquo;Mrs. Thrall will be very sorry, ma'am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Back in the Maritime Capital, and oh, Dolly, Dolly, Dolly! They have
+      sighted the <i>Little Sally</i> from the terrace! How happy I am! There
+      will be letters from you, and I shall hear all that has happened in
+      America, and I shall never again doubt that Altruria is real! I don't know
+      how I shall get these letters of mine back to you, but somehow it can be
+      managed. Perhaps the <i>Saraband's</i> crew will like to take the <i>Little
+      Sally</i> home again; perhaps when Mr. Thrall knows the ship is here he
+      will want to buy it and go back to his money in America and the misery of
+      it! Do you believe he will? Should I like to remind my husband of his
+      promise to take me home on a visit? Oh, my heart misgives me! I wonder if
+      the captain of the <i>Little Sally</i> has brought his wife and children
+      with him, and is going to settle among us, or whether he has just let his
+      men have the vessel, and they have come to Altruria without him? I dare
+      not ask anything, I dare not think anything!
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      THE END
+    </h3>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Through the Eye of the Needle, by
+William Dean Howells
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+</pre>
+
+  </body>
+</html>
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