“If you live here—take on our ways, our beliefs, our mode of thinking, you may, in a score of years, grow like us, outwardly; but, inwardly, where the true like must start, never!”
“How do we differ?”
“Ask me something easier! You’ve been bred differently, used to different things, to doing them in a different way. We do things slowly, leisurely, with a fine disregard of time, you, with the modern rush, and bustle, and hurry. You are a man of the world—I repeat it—up to the minute in everything—never lagging behind, unless you wish. You never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day. We never do anything to-day that can be put off till to-morrow.”
“And which do you prefer, the to-day or the to-morrow?” he asked.
“It depends on my humor, and my location, at the time—though, I must admit, the to-day makes for thrift, and business, and success in acquiring wealth.”
“And success also in getting rid of it. It is a return toward the primitive condition—the survival of the fittest. There must be losers as well as acquirers.”
“There’s the pity of it!” she exclaimed, “that one must lose in order that another may gain.”
“But as we are not in Utopia or Altruria,” he smiled, “it will continue so to be. Why, even in Baltimore, they——” 189
“Oh, Baltimore is only an overgrown country town!” she exclaimed.
“Granted!” he replied. “With half a million population, it is as provincial as Hampton, and thanks God for it—the most smug, self-satisfied, self-sufficient municipality in the land, with its cobblestones, its drains-in-the-gutters, its how much-holier-than-thou air about everything.”