The different degrees of urgency in personal impressions are reflected in the behavior of different classes of people. Everyone must have noticed that he finds more real openness of sympathy in the country than in the city—though perhaps there is more of a superficial readiness in the latter—and often more among plain, hand-working people than among professional and business men. The main reason for this, I take it, is that the social imagination is not so hard worked in the one case as in the other. In the mountains of North Carolina the hospitable inhabitants will take in any stranger and invite him to spend the night; but this is hardly possible upon Broadway; and the case is very much the same with the hospitality of the mind. If one sees few people and hears a new thing only once a week, he accumulates a fund of sociability and curiosity very favorable to eager intercourse; but if he is assailed all day and every day by calls upon feeling and thought in excess of his power to respond, he soon finds that he must put up some sort of a barrier. Sensitive people who live where life is insistent take on a sort of social shell whose function is to deal mechanically with ordinary relations and preserve the interior from destruction. They are likely to acquire a conventional smile and conventional phrases for polite intercourse, and a cold mask for curiosity, hostility, or solicitation. In fact, a vigorous power of resistance to the numerous influences that in no way make for the substantial development of his character, but rather tend to distract and demoralize him, is a primary need of one who lives in the more active portions of present society, and the loss of this power by strain is in countless instances the beginning of mental and moral decline. There are times of abounding energy when we exclaim with Schiller, “Seid willkommen, Millionen, Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!”