pleasing. You will not believe it, or at least you will not believe it of me, and you could not acquire faith without coming here and staying rather longer than you are ever likely to do.
It is not that people do not talk of people in New York, but they do not talk of them in our way, as acquaintance from the cradle up, by their nicknames or pet names, with a constant sense of their lurking cousinship. There is of course, this sort of intimacy here, but it does not quite turn the sojourner out of doors. I have been to your Van der Doeses, and they have been hospitable, but they did not make me feel that I mattered. I did not wish to matter, and yet an expectation of that sort ought to be imagined. They were very light, as people of the old Dutch blood are apt to be (the Dutch Calvinism was so very different from our Puritanism!) and though they had the evidences of refinement about them, I had somehow a fear that they might any moment begin asking conundrums. I do not know how else to put it, and I am afraid my meaning will not be perfectly clear to you. Is it possible that there was something in the air of our elder Boston, breathed from the interstellar spaces where our lights of literature and learning, of poetry and philosophy shone so long, which penetrated our psychical substance as nothing of the kind has the New Yorkers' ?
One curious experience as a Bostonian has come to me from these New Yorkers through their remote verification of the fact that we Bostonians are no longer so literary or philosophic as we once were. In that former time they imagined us lettered pedants or transcendental cranks, and they laughed at their notion of us. Now they have somehow (their unintelligence is baffling) caught on to a change in us, and they no longer smile at our queerness; they no longer think of us at all; we suggest nothing to them. This is putting it rather crudely, and it is saying it in excess, of course, but a sad truth lies at the bottom of the well in which I hope this may not make you wish to drown yourself.
At the Van der Doeses' I could naturally meet none but their own kind; but they have been retrospectively more attentive than they actually were, and they have taken me with them to several functions, and had cards sent me for others, where I have seen a greater variety of my fellow mortals. You know I never scorned those simple at-homes and teas which most men disdain, and now when dinners rather take it out of me, I have been going to afternoon receptions with more than my earlier ardor. I have had my reward, for I have met there some agreeable women (rather too shrieky; but the noise is great) and such men of aesthetic employment as business does not hold in its grip quite till dinner. At the house of an editor who has made so much money with his paper The Signal; its name would say nothing to you; but it has been rather dreadful) that he is now in case to clean up, and who has begun by housing himself, on the East side, rather too magnificently, I found some Perennial men, the other day; and there was an author or two, as authors go in New York, and some painters who, as things go anywhere, are always more interesting than authors. We were not without actors, for it was not a matinee afternoon, and I saw in the flesh the prevailing actress, though in rather less of it than I had seen her on the stage. It was pleasant, or at least piquant; if I were to distinguish so closely I should say that New York always piques rather than pleases, and Boston — well Boston at least does not pique; and it was the more amusing because it was of that provisional character in which what one may roughly call celebrity rather than society played the chief part. The Van der Doeses felt obliged to account for their presence to some of their friends whom they met, and their friends were likewise exculpatory; you know what I mean. The celebrity was nothing to them, or rather worse; I do not care for it much myself, because it is tiresome; it does not know what to do with itself; and you do not know what to do with it; but there were people there who were all eyes and ears for it. There was a pretty boy (the boys are so pretty now, with their shaven faces, which make us eighteen-sixty fellows look so barbaric with our beards, even when they go no farther than an " educated whisker " or two) who told me afterwards that he was from Iowa, of all places, and teased me with the sense of having seen him before, somewhere. I can't make out yet where it was, if it was really anywhere, but probably it was nowhere. He interested me past the vain quest by asking me when the prevalent actress had turned from me, whether it were she, and then rushed off to a large, flowery young woman — sun-flowery is not too much — and seemed to excite her with the fact as much as himself. Their emotion was so interesting that I did a thing I should not have done when I was under fifty. I followed him up and asked him if he would like to be presented, and the young woman to whom his eager eyes referred me, said, " She would give the world to, " and I led them up, and sacrificed them on the shrine of the amiable deity, who had instantly forgotten me, but received us as if we were her oldest friends. After her dispersing welcome, we rather had ourselves on each others' hands, and following an interval in which we treated one another as veteran New Yorkers, we arrived at a sense of our common strangeness, and exchanged our geographical derivations. As the young woman said she had always wanted to see Boston, I could not do less than own that the disappointment of my life was never having seen Iowa. By and by, she asked the young man, who had naturally dropped out of the conversation, if he would not go and hunt up her father, and he presently came back with an old fellow so exactly of my years and of her looks that I had a difficulty in disentangling my consciousness from a tie of kindred. But my contemporary viewed me with an instant of suspicion which I had not experienced from his posterity. He asked, pretty stiffly, if she wanted to go, and she took a fonder leave of me than he. The Van der Doeses turned up in time to break my fall, and they had not quite finished asking me how in the world I had got hold of the Cheese and Churn Trust, when the father returned, with the air of having had it taken out of him by the sunflowery young woman, and said his daughter had been telling him how very kind I had been, and he wanted to thank me. He gave me his card, and when he went the Van der Doeses explained that this was the magnate whose financiering skill is going to embitter our bread to all of us who like butter and cheese with it, and sketched his social career in New York. It could be done briefly, because it had gone no farther than buying a lot worth its width in gold, to build on, and coasting along the shores of society. They added harrowing stories of Western millionaires who had failed to get in, and had gone to Europe to hide their sorrows in the bosom of the aristocracies there; but these Ralsons were inexhaustibly good natured, and the daughter seemed to know how to place the father's money where it would do the most good. She had an instinct or an inspiration concerning the right sort of charities, and if she could find a foothold in Newport, the thing was done. They were very good-natured about it; New York is good-natured about everything; and they were not sorry not to despair of the Ralsons. They did not know who the pretty boy was; perhaps a reminiscence of pre-existence in Iowa (the terms are mine;) or a relation whom Papa Ralson was bringing up to inherit him in the Trust.
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