I like many of the people I have met here more than I can tell you, but late at night, sometimes, alone in my always monotonously perfect bedroom, when all through the house not a creature is stirring, not even a--valet, I often giggle at the abysmal difference between us. And in spite of all their hospitality and millions, the laugh, I must colloquially confess, is on them. For although I am perfectly capable of meeting them on _their_ ground, they could not possibly meet me on mine. From earliest childhood our influences and training have been as far apart as the poles, but I consider mine by far the more important and valuable; for, when I feel like it, I can go into society, while they have no idea at all of the relief and delight of getting out of it. They know their own side of life, but I am perfectly conversant with theirs and several others as well. When I am with them I can do all of their stunts just as well as they do them themselves, but I know, somewhere in the back of my head, that they couldn’t do any of mine. I don’t despise them or look down on them for this, but I do, every now and then, feel awfully sorry for them--regret for them the things they have missed and are missing. “Just what does he mean by that?” I think I can see you wonder. Well, I mean all sorts of things, and for the most part they are, no doubt, absurd and incommunicable. I mean, for instance, that I know all about their fussy, tedious, proper, little childhoods, and that they do not know, and never will know, anything about mine. In my opinion, their childhood was a decorous tragedy; in their opinion, if they learned about it, mine would be a sensational scandal. In New York it always gives me a queer, asphyxiated feeling when I see pretty, expensively dressed little boys walking for exercise on upper Fifth avenue in charge of a maid or a footman, or being transported in an automobile or a victoria for an hour’s “romp” in the park. And here at Newport I have overheard little girls discussing with acuteness and authority the probable length of time it would take the lady who has rented the palace next door to arrive at the goal of her social ambitions.