"Perhaps I don't, but to me the peculiarities are all in Chicago's favor. I love the go-ahead spirit, and I love the lack of affectation among the people one meets."
"The go-ahead spirit you love," Marion replied, "is but an insatiable craving for the 'mighty dollar', and the lack of affectation resolves itself into a lack of savoir faire."
"Why, Marion, how can you say such things. You have friends here with as much knowledge of the world as any one."
"Yes, but how many? Perhaps fifty, or be liberal and say a hundred, and they were all brought up away from Chicago, or, like myself, have lived away from here a good many years of their lives. If they remain here long enough they will stagnate like the natives."
"You unpatriotic rebel. I have almost a mind to denounce you to the people you are slandering."
"I am not slandering them. I am only speaking my convictions. You think I am captious, but I merely understand the subject, and I ought to, for heaven knows I have had a long enough experience. One has the choice here between parvenu vulgarity and Puritanic narrow mindedness. The one makes us the butt of the comic papers and the other is simply unbearable. I was brought up in the latter, and of course all ancient families,—that is to say, those dating from before the fire,—come under that eminently respectable classification, but I actually believe one would find the pork-packers more distracting."
"What do you call Puritanic narrow-mindedness, Marion?"
"I call it that carping sanctimoniousness which makes certain people throw up their hands in horror at the slightest appearance of advanced and civilized ideas. It is scarcely more than five years since a woman who wore décolleté evening gowns was one of the chosen of Beelzebub, a warm meal on Sunday night was a sacrilege, and wine at dinner the creation of the Devil himself; but the people who hold such ideas will talk scandal by the hour while making red flannel shirts for heathen babies. I don't believe you know how a few of us have struggled to liberalize this city and raise its society a little above that of a country village."
"You are too bitter, Marion."
"No, I am not. You should have witnessed the tussle I had with mama, before I was married, in order to get livery on our coachman, and to abolish the anachronism of a one-o'clock dinner."