out our way, who will drive twenty miles in a sleigh to go to a dance. The mere look of the table--the glass, the silver, the flowers--goes to my head. The terrapin intoxicates me. Those quick, soft-moving servants fascinate me. And the conversation! They let me talk all I want.” “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----”