“Why?”
“Really, Mrs. Makely, I think I shall have to give him back to you,” I said.
The lady laughed. “I am not sure that I want him back.”
“Oh yes,” the Altrurian entreated, with unwonted perception of the humor. “I know that I must be very trying with my questions; but do not abandon me to the solitude of my own conjectures. They are dreadful!”
“Well, I won’t,” said the lady, with another laugh. “And I will try to tell you what would happen if those farmers, or farm-hands, or whatever they are, were asked in. The mammas would be very indignant, and the young ladies would be scared, and nobody would know what to do, and the dance would stop.”
“Then the young ladies prefer to dance with one another and with little boys—”
“No, they prefer to dance with young men of their own station; they would rather not dance at all than dance with people beneath them. I don’t say anything against these natives here; they are very civil and decent. But they have not the same social traditions as the young ladies; they would be out of place with them, and they would feel it.”
“Yes, I can see that they are not fit to associate with them,” said the Altrurian, with a gleam of commonsense that surprised me, “and that as long as your present conditions endure they never can be. You must excuse the confusion which the difference between your political ideals and your economic ideals constantly creates in me. I always think of you politically first, and realize you as a perfect democracy; then come these other facts, in which I cannot perceive that you differ from the aristocratic countries of Europe in theory, or practice. It is very puzzling. Am I right in supposing that the effect of your economy is to establish insuperable inequalities among you, and to forbid the hope of the brotherhood which your policy proclaims?”
Mrs. Makely looked at me as if she were helpless to grapple with his meaning, and, for fear of worse, I thought best to evade it. I said: “I don’t believe that anybody is troubled by those distinctions. We are used to them, and everybody acquiesces in them, which is a proof that they are a very good thing.”
Mrs. Makely now came to my support. “The Americans are very high-spirited, in every class, and I don’t believe one of those nice farm-boys would like being asked in any better than the young ladies. You can’t imagine how proud some of them are.”