It was Julia Girdwood that spoke first, and Cornelia Inskip who replied.
They were seated in a handsome apartment—one of a suite in the Clarendon Hotel, London.
“Yes,” pursued the first speaker; “there one has at least some society; if not the élite, still sufficiently polished for companionship. Here there is none—absolutely none—outside the circle of the aristocracy. Those merchants’ wives and daughters we’ve been compelled to associate with, rich as they are, and grand as they deem themselves, are to me simply insufferable. They can think of nothing but their Queen.”
“That’s true.”
“And I tell you, Cornelia, if a peeress, or the most obscure thing with ‘Lady’ tacked to her name, but bows to one of them, it is remembered throughout their life, and talked of every day among their connections. Only think of that old banker where mamma took us to dine the other day. He had one of the Queen’s slippers framed in a glass case, and placed conspicuously upon his drawing-room mantelshelf. And with what gusto the old snob descanted upon it! How he came to get possession of it; the price he paid; and his exquisite self-gratulation at being able to leave it as a valued heirloom to his children—snobbish as himself! Faugh! ’Tis a flunkeyism intolerable. Among American merchants, one is at least spared such experience as that. Even our humblest shopkeepers would scorn so to exhibit themselves!”
“True, true!” assented Cornelia; who remembered her own father, an humble shopkeeper in Poughkeepsie, and knew that he would have scorned it.
“Yes,” continued Julia, returning to her original theme, “of all cities in the world, give me New York. I can say of it, as Byron did of England, ‘With all thy faults, I love thee still!’ though I suspect when the great poet penned that much-quoted line, he must have been very tired of Italy and the stupid Countess Guiccioli.”
“Ha—ha—ha!” laughed the Poughkeepsian cousin, “what a girl you are, Julia! Well, I’m glad you like our dear native New York.”
“Who wouldn’t, with its gay, pleasant people, and their cheerful give and take? Many faults it has, I admit; bad municipal management—wholesale political corruption. These are but spots on the outward skin of its social life, and will one day be cured. Its great, generous heart, sprung from Hibernia, is still uncontaminated.”
“Hurrah! hurrah!” cried Cornelia, springing up from her seat and clapping her little hands. “I’m glad, cousin, to hear you speak thus of the Irish!”