"Of course, not necessarily disgraceful, as you say, Milbrey," interrupted Shepler, "and they often do conceal it. Why, I know a chap in New York who was positively never east of Kansas City until he was twenty-five or so, and yet that fellow to-day"--he lowered his voice to the pitch of impressiveness--"has over eighty pairs of trousers and complains of the hardship every time he has to go to Boston." "Fancy, now!" exclaimed Mrs. Drelmer, the blonde. Mr. Milbrey looked slightly puzzled and Uncle Peter chuckled, affirming mentally that Rulon Shepler must be like one of those tug-boats, with most of his lines under the surface. "But, I say, you know, Shepler," protested one of the solemn young men, "he must still talk like a banjo." "And gargle all his 'r's,'" added the other, very earnestly. "They never get over that, you know." "Instead of losin' 'em entirely," put in Uncle Peter, who found himself feeling what his grandson called "Westy." "Of course, he calls it 'Ne' Yawk,' and prob'ly he don't like it in Boston because they always call 'em 'rawroystahs.'" "Good for the old boy!" thought Percival, and then, aloud: "It _is_ hard for the West and the East to forgive each other's dialects. The inflated 'r' and the smothered 'r' never quite harmonise." "Western money talks good straight New York talk," ventured Miss Milbrey, with the air of one who had observed in her time. Shepler grinned, and the parents of the young woman resisted with indifferent success their twin impulses to frown. "But the service is so wretched in the West," suggested Oldaker, the carefully dressed little man with the tired, troubled eyes, whom the world had been deprived of. "I fancy, now, there's not a good waiter this side of New York." "An American," said Percival, "never _can_ make a good waiter or a good valet. It takes a Latin, or, still better, a Briton, to feel the servility required for good service of that sort. An American, now, always fails at it because he knows he is as good as you are, and he knows that you know it, and you know that he knows you know it, and there you are, two mirrors of American equality face to face and reflecting each other endlessly, and neither is comfortable. The American is as uncomfortable at having certain services performed for him by another American as the other is in performing them. Give him a Frenchman or an Italian or a fellow born within the sound of Bow Bells to clean his boots and lay out his things and serve his dinner and he's all right enough." "Hear, hear!" cried Uncle Peter. "Fancy, now," said Mrs. Drelmer, "a creature in a waiter's jacket having emotions of that sort!"