"Not to this sort of thing. Yes, there's a million and a half of us here, and this little quarter of a square mile is probably the most crowded and the most active of any on the globe, and yet it isn't found worth while to keep it clean, or even decent, small as it is. On days like this you feel as if you just wanted to remove the inhabitants and annex the whole place to the Stock-yards."
Mrs. Floyd paused in the adjustment of her bedraggled skirts and looked up fiercely.
"Why remove the inhabitants?" she inquired.
"Frances!" called her husband.
"Why, indeed?" asked Winthrop. "I never saw such a beastly rabble in my life."
"Nor I," she cried. All her smouldering resentment against the town broke out with the appearance of a new Eastern ally.
"Except in Madrid or Naples." Winthrop had travelled in his younger days; he never made these European comparisons except under extreme provocation.
"Why are things so horrible in this country?" demanded Mrs. Floyd, plaintively.
"Because there's no standard of manners—no resident country gentry to provide it. Our own rank country folks have never had such a check, and this horrible rout of foreign peasantry has just escaped from it. What little culture we have in the country generally we find principally in a few large cities, and they have become so large that the small element that works for a bettering is completely swamped."
He looked almost pityingly on his brother. "This is no town for a gentleman," he felt obliged to acknowledge. "What an awful thing," he admitted further, "to have only one life to live, and to be obliged to live it in such a place as this!"