What I at the moment felt toward all the more deeply cultured men whose acquaintanceship I sought and still in a sense feel toward them was something like what a young mechanic might feel when his boss comes into the shop accompanied by his daughter. The young mechanic is standing at his lathe and there is grease on his face and hands. The boss’s daughter has never been shown over the shop before and is a little excited by the presence of so many strange men and as she and her father approach the lathe where the young workman stands he does not know whether to appear surly and uncommunicative or bold and a bit impudent. (In his place I, being an American, should probably have winked at the girl and been terribly embarrassed and ashamed later.) There he stands fumbling about with his fingers and pretending to look out of the window and--the devil!--now the boss has stopped behind his lathe and is attempting to explain something to the daughter, “This is a sprocket post, is it not?” he says to the workman, who is compelled to turn around. “Yes, sir,” he mutters, in embarrassment but his eyes, in just that fraction of a second, have taken a sweeping glance at the daughter. And now she is gone and the workman is asking himself questions. “If I was a swell now I suppose maybe I’d be invited to their house.” He imagines himself in a dress suit going up a long driveway to the front of a grand house. He is swinging a cane and there on the front steps is the boss’s daughter waiting to receive him. What will he talk to her about? Dare a man speak in such company of the only things he knows? What does he know? He knows that Jack Johnson could probably have whipped Jess Willard if he had really tried. There is a woman lives in his rooming house who is unfaithful to her husband. He knows who with. She is going to have a child but the chances are it is not her husband’s child. Often he has asked himself how she will feel on the night when the child is born and when her husband is so excited and proud. After all, the young workman knows a good many things of his own sort, but of how many of them can he, dare he, speak with the boss’s daughter whose voice was so soft and whose skin looked so delicate that day when she came into the shop with her father? “Dare I ask her what she thinks the unfaithful wife will be thinking and feeling when the child is born?” Young workmen have a kind of fear of the thing called culture. Most middle-westerners think of it--in spite of their protestations to the contrary--as in some vague way to be breathed in the air of New York. New Yorkers seem to think of it as to be found in London or Paris. Bankers and manufacturers of the Middle-West hope to get it for their sons by sending them to Yale or Harvard and as there are a good many bankers and manufacturers Yale and Harvard are inclined to be crowded. Mark Twain thought he would find it in Boston--a whole generation of Americans thought that.