“You are a vastly entertaining fellow in your own mental bailiwick,” interjected Thorndyke.
“And the women! So unaffected—so unconscious of their clothes! And such listeners! I have never been to a stupid dinner in Washington. And the club—I never knew a man of leisure in my life until I came to Washington. I daresay you think me a fool.” Crane paused, with a feeling rare to him that he could not express half what was in him, but Thorndyke’s knowledge supplied the rest.
“No, I don’t. It is quite as you say, but you are taking it all too seriously.”
“Circleville,” murmured Crane.
“Well, three-fourths of these people you so admire came from Circlevilles. Forty years ago, how many of them, do you think, had a servant to answer the door-bell? Just consider, my dear young friend, that, except at the South, servants were unknown to a large proportion of the American people until a short time ago. The parents of these people you see here, with eighteen-horse-power automobiles, and with crests upon their writing-paper, their carriages, their footmen’s buttons, thought themselves in clover when they could afford a maid-of-all-work. So far, they are merely at the imitative stage. Their grandparents were pioneers and lived mostly in log cabins, and although the three generations are divided by only fifty years, it is as if æons of time existed between them! By Jove! It is one of the most astounding things in American life!”
“That’s so,” replied Crane. “It is said that one-half the world doesn’t know how the other half lives, but in these United States about nine-tenths of the society people have no more notion how their grandparents lived than they have of life on Mars or Saturn. I went to a wedding the other day. It was magnificent beyond words. The two young people had been brought up in——”
“Barbaric luxury,” Thorndyke interrupted. “It’s barbarous to bring children up as those two were—I know whom you mean. The girl had her own suite of rooms almost from her birth, her own maid, her own trap. Even when there was an affectation of simplicity it cost enough to have swamped her grandfather’s general store at Meekins’s Cross Roads, where he laid the foundation of his fortune. When she came out in society it simply meant more of everything. No daughter of the Cæsars was ever more conscious of the gulf between her and the common people—I say common people with the deepest respect for the term—than this girl is conscious of the gulf between herself and the class to which her grandparents belonged. The young man’s story was the same da capo, except that he was given a boy’s luxuries instead of a girl’s. It has been carefully concealed from them by their parents that their grandparents swept, dusted, chopped wood, traded at country stores, and did all those plain but useful and respectable things which made their fortune. To hear them talk about ‘grandmamma’ and ‘grandpapa’ is the very essence of simplicity.”
“And yet those people constitute the most exclusive set in Washington,” said Crane, angrily, as if thereby some wrong was inflicted on him.
“Naturally,” replied Thorndyke. “Don’t you see that the first result of their prosperity in their own community was to segregate them from their less fortunate friends and neighbours? Don’t you see how inevitably it came about that their children were separated from their neighbours’ children? And in the end they were drawn from the Circlevilles and the Meekins’s Cross Roads by sheer necessity? They became fugitives, as it were, from their own class, and how natural it was for them to be afraid of their own and every other class except the recognised few, and to build up a wall around themselves and their children.”
“I wonder if you would dare to use that word class on the floor of the House?” asked Crane.