"It all comes of our national love of privacy," said Mr. Selby; "it isn't stinginess, I beg you to believe, Mrs. Henderson, but shyness,—you find our hearts all right when you get in."
"That we do; but, I beg pardon, Mr. Selby, oughtn't shyness to be put down in the list of besetting sins, and fought against; isn't it the enemy of brotherly kindness and charity?"
"Certainly, Mrs. Henderson, you practice so delightfully, one cannot find fault with your preaching," said Mr. Selby; "but, after all, is it a sin to want to keep one's private life to himself, and unexposed to the comments of vulgar, uncongenial natures? It seems to me, if you will pardon the suggestion, that there is too little of this sense of privacy in America. Your public men, for instance, are required to live in glass cases, so that they may be constantly inspected behind and before. Your press interviewers beset them on every hand, take down their chance observations, record everything they say and do, and how they look and feel at every moment of their lives. I confess that I would rather be comfortably burned at the stake at once than to be one of your public men in America; and all this comes of your not being shy and reserved. It's a state of things impossible in the kind of country that has high walls with glass bottles around its private grounds."
"He has us there, Eva," said Harry; "our vulgar, jolly, democratic level of equality over here produces just these insufferable results; there's no doubt about it."
"Well," said Jim, "I have one word to say about newspaper reporters. Poor boys! everybody is down on them, nobody has a bit of charity for them; and yet, bless you, it isn't their fault if they're impertinent and prying. That is what they are engaged for and paid for, and kicked out if they're not up to. Why, look you, here are four or five big dailies running the general gossip-mill for these great United States, and if any one of them gets a bit of news before another, it's a victory—a 'beat.' Well, if the boys are not sharp, if other papers get things that they don't or can't, off they must go; and the boys have mothers and sisters to support—and want to get wives some day—and the reporting business is the first round of the ladder; if they get pitched off, it's all over with them."
"Precisely," said Mr. Selby; "it is, if you will pardon my saying it, it is your great American public that wants these papers and takes them, and takes the most of those that have the most gossip in them, that are to blame. They make the reporters what they are, and keep them what they are, by the demand they keep up for their wares; and so, I say, if Mrs. Henderson will pardon me, that, as yet, I am unable to put down our national shyness in the catalogue of sins to be fought against. I confess I would rather, if I should ever happen to have any literary fame, I would rather shut my shutters, evenings, and have high walls with glass bottles on top around my grounds, and not have every vulgar, impertinent fellow in the community commenting on my private affairs. Now, in England, we have all arrangements to keep our families to ourselves, and to such intimates as we may approve."
"Oh, yes, I knew it to my cost when I was in England," said Eva. "You might be in a great hotel with all the historic characters of your day, and see no more of them than if you were in America. They came in close family carriages, they passed to close family rooms, they traveled in railroad compartments specially secured to themselves, and you knew no more about them than if you had stayed at home."
"Well," said Mr. Selby, "you describe what I think are very nice, creditable, comfortable ways of managing."
"With not even a newspaper reporter to tell the people what they were talking about, and what gowns their wives and daughters wore," said Bolton, dryly. "I confess, of the two extremes, the English would most accord with my natural man."
"So it is with all of us," said St. John; "the question is, though, whether this strict caste system which links people in certain lines and ruts of social life, doesn't make it impossible to have that knowledge of one another as human beings which Christianity requires. It struck me in England that the high clergy had very little practical comprehension of the feelings of the lower classes, and their wives and daughters less. They were prepared to dispense charity to them from above, but not to study them on the plane of equal intercourse. They never mingle, any more than oil and water; and that, I think, is why so much charity in England is thrown away—the different classes do not understand each other, and never can."