“So I thought—I was educated in France. I believe in rank and all that—it seems to me absurd to talk about equality. But I despise this silly squabble over little places that last only a few years at most. As Mr. Boughton was saying—you know Mr. Boughton?”
“You mean the Second Secretary at our Embassy?”
“Yes. He said to me only last night: ‘America has an aristocracy just as we have, but gets from it all the evils and none of the good, all the pettiness, none of the dignity and sense of responsibility.’”
“But they tell me it’s different—out West.”
“I don’t know. I can only speak of the East—especially of Washington. There isn’t a capital in Europe or Asia, the diplomats say, with so elaborate a system of rank and precedence as we have. Why, do you know, it’s so bad that the fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-year clerks and their families have a society of their own between the circles of those who get eighteen hundred and those who get twelve hundred. And they’d rather die than mix with those who get less than they do.”
“Really! Really, now!”
“And anything like a good time is almost impossible. It’s precedence, precedence everywhere, always. You can’t entertain informally.”
“It must be as if one were laced in a straight jacket.”
“I’m going abroad next year and am never coming back, if I can help it. I’m going where at least there’s real rank to get excited about. I’ll go with Ysobel and her mother—unless Ysobel decides to marry on this side.”
Frothingham was internally agitated, but gave no sign of it.