In all the dining-rooms there rises the gusty noise of many conversations above the music of an orchestra determined to be heard, and between the bars of a Leslie Stuart waltz, or on the last beat of the "Humoreske," a colored waiter says, "Chicken okra, sah?" or "Clam chowder?" and one hears the laughing words of a girl who asks, "Do you mind if I powder my nose?" and does so with a glance at a little gold mirror and a dab from a little gold box. The vastness, and the overwhelming luxury, of the New York hotels was my first and strongest impression in this city, after I had recovered from the sensation of the high fantastic buildings; but it occurred to me very quickly that this luxury of architecture and decoration has no close reference to the life of the people. They are only visitors in _la vie de luxe_--and do not belong to it, and do not let it enter into their souls or bodies. In a wealthier, more expansive way, they are like the city clerks and their girls in London who pay eighteenpence for a meal in marble halls at Lyon's Popular Café and sit around a gilded menu-card, saying, "Isn't it wonderful ... and shall we go home by tram?" There are many rich people in New York--more, I suppose, than in any other city of the world--but, apart from cosmopolitan men and women who have luxury beneath their skins, there is no innate sense of it in the social life of these people. In the hotel palaces, as well as in the private mansions along Fifth Avenue and Riverside Drive, all their outward splendor does not alter the simplicity and honesty of their character. They remain essentially "middle-class" and have none of the easy licentiousness of that European aristocracy which, before the war, flaunted its wealth and its vice in Paris, Vienna, Monte Carlo, and other haunts where the cocottes of the world assembled to barter their beauty, and where idle men went from boredom to boredom in search of subtle forms of pleasure. American women of wealth spend vast sums of money on dress, and there is the glitter of diamonds at many dinner-tables, but most of them have too much shrewdness of humor to play the "vamp," and the social code to which they belong is swept clean by common sense. "My dear," said an American hostess who belongs to one of the old rich families of New York, "forgive me for wearing my diamonds to-night. It must shock you, coming from scenes of ruin and desolation." This dowager duchess of New York, as I like to think of her, wore her diamonds as the mayor of a provincial town in England wears his chain of office, but as she sat at the head of her table in one of the big mansions of New York I saw that wealth had not cumbered the soul of this masterful lady, whose views on life are as direct and simple as those of Abraham Lincoln. She was the middle-class housewife in spite of the footmen who stood in fear of her.