But, to return to the people of Zenith, I found them very like well-bred people anywhere else--like, say, well-bred people in Philadelphia or in an English city. They read--the women, anyway--desultorily, as people everywhere read, but books demanding some effort: _The Revolt against Civilization_, _The Education of Henry Adams_, novels by Couperus, Bojer, and Knut Hamsun; almost never poetry. They did not know a great deal about pictures--at least, pictures and statues were not an intimate part of their lives--because in Zenith there was no art gallery; they did not have daily opportunity to look at pictures. But a great many of them were intelligently and sincerely fond of music, because there was much good music to be heard every year in Zenith. A string quartet would be glad indeed to draw such a house in New York as it draws in Zenith. When you come to think of it, all this is natural enough (except perhaps the intensity of their love for music--but I shall say more of that later). There is no reason outside of literature why these people should have been crude or conventionally Middle-Western. Virtually all of them had been away to school or college, probably half of the younger men and a much larger proportion of the younger women in the East; all had travelled widely in America, and a great many, especially the women, in Europe. A considerable number of the older ones go to California or Florida for the winter. There were, of course, different groups and eddies within this society. There were the very young--the débutantes and their swains. I observed them at the dances and talked casually with a few, but I really learned little about them. My very superficial impression, which I give you for whatever it may be worth, was that they had magnificent and amusing _savoir-faire_, beneath which they hid an ashamed ingenuousness. I do not know or greatly care what their morals were, but I should guess that they were much the same as morals were among people of their age and wealth ten years ago or twenty.