Well! Not many months after we moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan I was elected to the Amsterdam--I, in serene ignorance of the trick that was being played upon me by my sponsors, associates in large financial deals and members of several exclusive really fashionable clubs. They pulled regretful faces as they talked of the “long waiting lists at most of the clubs.” They brightened as they spoke of the Amsterdam--“the finest and, take it all round, the most satisfactory of the whole bunch, old man. And we believe we’ve got pull enough to put you in there pretty soon. We’ll work it, somehow.” If I had known the shrivel-hearted trick behind their genial friendliness, I should not have minded, should probably have laughed. For, human littlenesses do not irritate me; and I have a vanity--I prefer to call it a pride--that lifts me out of their reach. I am of the one aristocracy that is truly exclusive, the only one that needs no artificial barriers to keep it so. But I shall not bore you, gentle reader, by explaining about it. You are interested only in the aristocracies of rank and title and wealth that are nothing but the tawdry realization of the tawdry fancies of the yokel among his kine and the scullery maid among her pots. For, who but a tossed-up yokel or scullery maid would indulge in such vulgarities as sitting upon a gold throne or living in a draughty, cheerless palace or seeking to make himself more ridiculous by aggravating his littleness with a title, like the ass in the lion’s skin? Did it ever occur to you, gentle reader, that aristocracy is essentially common, essentially vulgar? To a large vision the distinction between king and carpenter, between the man with a million dollars and the million men with one dollar looks trivial and unimportant. Only a squat and squinting soul in a cellar and blinking through the twilight could discover agitating differences of rank between Fifth Avenue and Grand Street, between first floor front and attic rear, between flesh ripening to rot in silk and flesh ripening to rot in cotton. To an infinitesimal insect an infinite gulf yawns between the molecules of a razor’s edge.