“Really, I can’t say, and I don’t know that I’ve explicit authority for my statement.”
“They are worse than the English used to be,” he went on. “I didn’t know that there were any foreigners who looked at us in that light now. I thought the war settled all that.”
I sighed. “There are a good many things that the war didn’t settle so definitely as we’ve been used to thinking, I’m afraid. But, for that matter, I fancy an Altrurian would regard the English as a little lower in the scale of savagery than ourselves even.”
“Is that so? Well, that’s pretty good on the English, anyway,” said my companion, and he laughed with an easy satisfaction that I envied him.
“My dear!” his wife called to him from where she was sitting with the Altrurian, “I wish you would go for my shawl. I begin to feel the air a little.”
“I’ll go if you’ll tell me where,” he said, and he confided to me, “Never knows where her shawl is one-quarter of the time.”
“Well, I think I left it in the office somewhere. You might ask at the desk; or perhaps it’s in the rack by the dining-room door—or maybe up in our room.”
“I thought so,” said her husband, with another glance at me, as if it were the greatest fun in the world, and he started amiably off.
I went and took a chair by the lady and the Altrurian, and she began at once: “Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come! I have been trying to enlighten Mr. Homos about some of the little social peculiarities among us that he finds so hard to understand. He was just now,” the lady continued, “wanting to know why all the natives out here were not invited to go in and join our young people in the dance, and I’ve been trying to tell him that we consider it a great favor to let them come and take up so much of the piazza and look in at the windows.”
She gave a little laugh of superiority, and twitched her pretty head in the direction of the young country girls and country fellows who were thronging the place that night in rather unusual numbers. They were well enough looking, and, as it was Saturday night, they were in their best. I suppose their dress could have been criticised; the young fellows were clothed by the ready-made clothing-store, and the young girls after their own devices from the fashion papers; but their general effect was good, and their behavior was irreproachable; they were very quiet—if anything, too quiet. They took up a part of the piazza that was yielded them by common usage, and sat watching the hop inside, not so much enviously, I thought, as wistfully; and for the first time it struck me as odd that they should have no part in the gayety. I had often seen them there before, but I had never thought it strange they should be shut out. It had always seemed quite normal, but now, suddenly, for one baleful moment, it seemed abnormal. I suppose it was the talk we had been having about the working-men in society which caused me to see the thing as the Altrurian must have seen it; but I was, nevertheless, vexed with him for having asked such a question, after he had been so fully instructed upon the point. It was malicious of him, or it was stupid. I hardened my heart, and answered: “You might have told him, for one thing, that they were not dancing because they had not paid the piper.”