But we are writing of Americans, and the Americans are the quickest people in the world to adapt themselves to new situations. The Western people travel much, at home and abroad, and they do not require a very long experience to know what is in bad taste. They are as quick as anybody—I believe they gave us the phrase—to “catch on” to quietness and a low tone. Indeed, I don’t know but they would boast that if it is a question of subdued style, they can beat the world. The revolution which has gone all over the country since the Exposition of 1876 in house-furnishing and decoration is quite as apparent in the West as in the East. The West has not suffered more than the East from eccentricities of architecture in the past twenty years. Violations of good taste are pretty well distributed, but of new houses the proportion of handsome, solid, good structures is as large in the West as in the East, and in the cities I think the West has the advantage in variety. It must be frankly said that if the Easterner is surprised at the size, cost, and palatial character of many of their residences, he is not less surprised by the refinement and good taste of their interiors. There are cases where money is too evident, where the splendor has been ordered, but there are plenty of other cases where individual taste is apparent, and love of harmony and beauty. What I am trying to say is that the East undervalues the real refinement of living going along with the admitted cost and luxury in the West. The art of dining is said to be a test of civilization—on a certain plane. Well, dining, in good houses (I believe that is the phrase), is much the same East and West as to appointments, service, cuisine, and talk, with a trifle more freedom and sense of newness in the West. No doubt there is a difference in tone, appreciable but not easy to define. It relates less to the things than the way the things are considered. Where a family has had “things” for two or three generations they are less an object than an unregarded matter of course; where things and a manner of living are newly acquired, they have more importance in themselves. An old community, if it is really civilized (I mean a state in which intellectual concerns are paramount), values less and less, as an end, merely material refinement. The tendency all over the United States is for wealth to run into vulgarity.