These people are amazingly cut off from and ignorant of the vast labouring class. They know that not one of themselves could be elected congressman or mayor or even to membership on the school-board, but they accept the fact coolly and without much resentment as revealing nothing more than the jealousy of the ‘Have-Nots’ for the ‘Haves,’ of those at the bottom for those who have deservedly reached the top. Yet they are democratic among themselves, and, unlike the McKelveys, admit newcomers easily, with no inquiry into their antecedents. They are not really snobbish. Many of the men are employers of labour on a large scale, yet even they seem to be merely exasperated by the increasing difficulties in controlling their men, in much the same way that the women are annoyed by the difficulty of getting and keeping servants. They talk of demagogues, of Red propaganda, of the unwillingness of men to do an honest day’s work, of labour unrest, of Bolshevism--oh, especially of Bolshevism! But among even these employers I could detect no perception that the whole economic system was being seriously questioned, and certainly no perception of the numerical strength and growing unity of the questioners. But it would not be fair to consider this ignorance in the class of people I am describing as confined especially to Zenith or the Middle-West. Where in the world does it not exist? A lesser fault was that there was no good general conversation. Indeed, there was virtually no general conversation at all. Perhaps this was because the men did not join in. There seemed, in fact, to be a strange separation of men from women in Zenith. The attitude of the men toward the women was delightful--easy, courteous without being deferential in the obnoxious Southern fashion--and the women’s attitude toward the men was equally pleasant. But men and women seemed to have nothing in common. They often did things together, played golf or bridge or tennis or even went on long canoe-trips, but they did not think together. They did not even appear to be united by sex-attraction. One simply did not feel, not ever, the haunting presence of that restless vivifying emotion. Zenith was uncannily, horribly cool. How in the world, I kept wondering, did babies get born here? Still, they did, and their mothers, with quite inadequate help, looked after them admirably. For real amusement the men liked to get off by themselves, have dinner, drink, and play poker or bridge. They were continually giving small parties of this sort in some private dining-room of the Zenith Club. At one which I attended a discussion of wives arose, the model wife being esteemed the one who cheerfully let her husband go out any or every evening. On this same evening a mixed dinner-party was being given in the ladies’ dining-room of the club, and when it was over the young men of that party drifted into our smaller room for a few minutes. They sniffed up