The strongest impression they made on me was that of smoothness. Their homes ran quietly, despite perpetual servant trouble; they entertained easily; even the weekly dinner-dance at the Country Club gave me a sense of smoothness that was rather delightful. The immense dining-room would be crowded--scores of big tables and little tables almost uncomfortably filled; but there seemed to be no friction, and the voices were a well-modulated hum, pleasant to hear. People did not seem to get in one another’s way; and that was true mentally as well as physically. They were very well-bred and they were not at all self-conscious. Almost, these people, collectively, had grace. A kind of delightful suavity surrounded them, that was like the suavity of their smoothly running Packards and Cadillacs. Not that they all had Packards or Cadillacs. Many of the younger men were still struggling near the bottom of the business ascent; a great many were less than well-to-do; a few were known to be virtually down and out. But the point is that none of them, even among these last, ever so much as questioned the system. Hatred and jealousy of individuals there must have been; a revolt against the collective whole, or even a doubt of its importance, none whatever. They were so very sure of themselves, so beautifully sure. They had something of the easy charm one sniffs up at the tea-room of the Ritz (in Paris). They were so sure of themselves that if an outsider expressed radical opinions or even questioned rudely the importance of the reality for which they stood, these Zenith people were not annoyed, but, quite politely, amused. They were, in fact, civilized. This was the dominant surface impression that I carried away from Zenith after my last visit, and it is so different from anything that I have read or heard about even the smallest minority in any Middle-Western city that I have gone about telling it to a number of people--in New York and elsewhere. My listeners, when at all interested, were sceptical, and usually observed that Zenith must be very different from most Middle-Western cities--a special case. It may be so. I do not profess to generalize about the whole region. Zenith is the only Middle-Western city that I know well. But I am doubtful. I rather fancy that people are corrupted by literature. They do not see things for themselves, even those close-by; instead, they read in novels or plays that things are thus and so, and take the author’s word for it. And the author, himself, I fancy, is frequently writing about what he, too, has read to be thus and so. One sees Victor Margueritte, for example, becoming uncomfortably aware (like all the rest of the elderly writers, through hearsay) that something dreadful has happened to the younger generation, and then setting out to write about it in _La Garçonne_--a work as sheerly literary, lacking in observation, and impossible in its psychology, as a novel by Florence Barclay.