“I see,” he returned, “that you reserve your _opinion_ of our more artificial society; but you may be sure that our reporters will get it out of you yet before you leave us.”
“Those horrid reporters!” one of the ladies irrelevantly sighed.
The gentleman resumed: “In the mean time, I don't mind saying how it strikes me. I think you are quite right about the indigenous American things being adapted only to the simpler life of the country and the smaller towns. It is so everywhere. As soon as people become at all refined they look down upon what is their own as something vulgar. But it is peculiarly so with us. We have nothing national that is not connected with the life of work, and when we begin to live the life of pleasure we must borrow from the people abroad, who have always lived the life of pleasure.”
“Mr. Homos, you know,” Mrs. Makely explained for me, as if this were the aptest moment, “thinks we all ought to work. He thinks we oughtn't to have any servants.”
“Oh no, my dear lady,” I put in. “I don't think that of you as you _are_. None of you could see more plainly than I do that in your conditions you _must_ have servants, and that you cannot possibly work unless poverty obliges you.”
The other ladies had turned upon me with surprise and horror at Mrs. Makely's words, but they now apparently relented, as if I had fully redeemed myself from the charge made against me. Mrs. Strange alone seemed to have found nothing monstrous in my supposed position. “Sometimes,” she said, “I wish we had to work, all of us, and that we could be freed from our servile bondage to servants.”
Several of the ladies admitted that it was the greatest slavery in the world, and that it would be comparative luxury to do one's own work. But they all asked, in one form or another, what were they to do, and Mrs. Strange owned that she did not know. The facetious gentleman asked me how the ladies did in Altruria, and when I told them, as well as I could, they were, of course, very civil about it, but I could see that they all thought it impossible, or, if not impossible, then ridiculous. I did not feel bound to defend our customs, and I knew very well that each woman there was imagining herself in our conditions with the curse of her plutocratic tradition still upon her. They could not do otherwise, any of them, and they seemed to get tired of such effort as they did make.