You must do something to be anything in the Middle West; just to have something doesn't count. You don't list your ancestors as you must in Virginia or the Carolinas, but to feel self-respecting you must do something.
I was happy to renew my wartime friendships. Those who have not shared a great work or a greater tragedy will not understand these bonds.
The same young friend who served tea to the king took me to a musicale. She wore her war medal. One of the guests, a lady from Virginia who claims four coats of arms, was impressed by the girl's medal and the fact that she had entertained the king.
The girl had married since the war, a fine young Irish lawyer, with a family name which once belonged to a king but which, since hard times hit the old sod, has been a butt for song and jest.
The name did not impress the lady from Virginia. “You have such an interesting face,” she said. “What was your name before your marriage?”
“Oh, it was much less interesting than my husband's,” answered my young Y friend, and lifting the conversation out of the personal she asked, “Have you read Mr. Keynes' 'The Economic Consequences of the Peace?'”
“I had n't read it myself,” she confided to me later, “but it was the first new book I could think of!”
That is good American manners and what the French call savoir faire.
The Far West still keeps the American inheritance of open hearted hospitality and its provincialism. The West has inherited some of the finest virtues of our country, and if it is not bitten by Back Bay, Philadelphia, Virginia, or Charleston, it will grow up into its mother's finest child.
“No church west of Chicago, no God west of Denver,” we used to hear when I was a child. But to-day, the churches are part of the community and even men go. People in the West do not seem to go to church merely out of respect for the devil and a conscience complex, but because they like to. Churches and schools are important places in the West.