“I suppose,” pursued Armitage, “we’d be tremendously amused if we could overhear those chaps talking to our wives about us. They don’t dare presume to the extent of mentioning our names. But they hand out generalities of roasting--how stupid most American men are, how superior the women are, what a tragic condescension for a wonderful American woman to have to live with a man who couldn’t appreciate her.” I nodded and laughed. “Nothing a woman loves so much--an American woman with a little miseducation befogging her mind and fooling her as to its limited extent--nothing she so dearly loves as to hear that she has a great intellect and a great soul, complex, mysterious, beyond the comprehension of the vulgar male clods about her. That’s why they like foreigners. You ought to watch those foreign chaps flatter our women--make perfect fools of them.” But I had no desire to watch women in any circumstances. I had no active resentment against them as had Armitage. I simply wished to be let alone, to be free to pursue my ambitions and my ideas of self-development. I had ceased to feel about Margot. I was merely glad she was not a boy; for I felt that if she were a boy, I should have to assert myself and do some drastic and disagreeable--and almost certainly disastrous--disciplining in my family. About a year and a half after my wife achieved her ambition, I began to feel that she was spiritually bearing down upon me in pursuance of some new secret plan. During the year and a half she had been playing the fashionable social game with the strenuous enthusiasm which only a woman--I had almost said only an American woman--seems able to inject into the pursuit of objects that are of no consequences whatsoever. And, in spite of the useful MacIlvane I had been compelled to assist her far more than was to my liking. I went about enough to get a thorough insight into fashionableness--and a profound distaste for it. Of the many phases, ludicrous, repellent, despicable, pitiful, there was one that made a deep impression upon me. It amazed me to find that the “best” class of people was, if possible, more vulgarly snobbish than the class from which I had come--even than the “Brooklyn bounders.” I could not comprehend--I cannot comprehend--how those who have had the best opportunities are no more intelligent, no broader of mind than those who have had no opportunities at all. The ignorance, the narrowness of the men and women of the comfortable classes!--the laziness of their minds!--the shallow cant about literature, art and the like! Really, intelligence, activity of mind, seems confined to the few who are pushing upward; and the masses of mankind in all classes seem contented each class with its own peculiar wallow of ignorance.