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+The Project Gutenberg EBook The Log-Cabin Lady, Author Unknown
+
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+Title: The Log-Cabin Lady, An Anonymous Autobiography
+
+Author: Unknown
+
+Release Date: September 2004  [EBook #6500]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on December 23, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LOG-CABIN LADY, ANONYMOUS ***
+
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+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger, widger@cecomet.net
+
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+
+
+                           THE LOG-CABIN LADY
+
+                       An Anonymous Autobiography
+
+
+
+                                 PREFACE
+
+The story of The Log-Cabin Lady is one of the annals of America.  It is
+a moving record of the conquest of self-consciousness and fear through
+mastery of manners and customs.  It has been written by one who has not
+sacrificed the strength and honesty of her pioneer girlhood, but who
+added to these qualities that graciousness and charm which have given
+her distinction on two continents.
+
+I have been asked to tell how the story of The Log-Cabin Lady came to be
+written.  At a luncheon given at the Colony Club in 1920, I was invited
+to talk about Madame Curie.  There were, at that table, a group of
+important women.
+
+When I had finished the story of the great scientist, whose service to
+humanity was halted by lack of laboratory equipment, and of the very
+radium which she had herself discovered, one guest asked: "Why do you
+spend your life with a woman's magazine when you could do big work like
+serving Madame Curie?" "I believe," I replied, "that a woman's magazine
+is one of the biggest services that can be rendered in this country."
+
+My challenge was met with scorn by one of the women upon whose education
+and accomplishments a fortune had been spent.  "It is stupid," she said,
+"to print articles about bringing up children and furnishing houses,
+setting tables and feeding families--or whether it is good form for the
+host to suggest another service at the dinner table."
+
+"There are twenty million homes in America," I answered.  "Only eight
+per cent of these have servants in them.  In the other ninety-two per
+cent the women do their own housework; bring up their own children, and
+take an active part in the life and growth of America.  They are the
+people who help make this country the great nation that it is."
+
+After luncheon one of the guests, a woman of great social prominence,
+distinguished both in her own country and abroad, asked me to drive
+downtown with her.  When we entered her car she said, with much
+feeling--"You must go on with the thing you are doing."
+
+Believing she referred to the Curie campaign, I replied that I had
+committed myself to the work and could not abandon it.  "I was not
+referring to the Curie campaign," she replied, "but to the Delineator.
+You are right; it is of vital importance to serve the great masses of
+people.  I know.  It will probably surprise you to learn that when I was
+fourteen years old I had never seen a table napkin.  My family were
+pioneers in the Northwest and were struggling for mere existence.  There
+was no time for the niceties of life.  And yet, people like my family
+and myself are worth serving and saving.  I have known what it means to
+lie awake all night, suffering with shame because of some stupid social
+blunder which had made me appear ridiculous before my husband's family
+or his friends."
+
+This was a most amazing statement from a woman known socially on two
+continents, and famed for her savoir faire.  There were tears in her
+eyes when she made her confession.  She was stirred by a very real and
+deep emotion.  It had been years, she said, since the old recollections
+had come back to her, but she had been moved by my plea for service to
+home women and to the great mass of ordinary American people.
+
+She told me that while living abroad she had often met American girls--
+intelligent women, well bred, the finest stuff in the world--who
+suffered under a disadvantage, because they lacked a little training in
+the social amenities.
+
+"It has been a satisfaction and a compensation to me," she added, "to be
+able sometimes to serve these fellow country-women of mine."
+
+And right there was born the idea which culminated in the writing of
+this little book.  I suggested that a million women could be helped by
+the publishing of her own story.
+
+The thought was abhorrent to her.  Her experience was something she had
+never voiced in words.  It would be too intimate a discussion of herself
+and her family.  She was sure her relatives would bitterly oppose such a
+confession.
+
+It took nearly a year to persuade this remarkable woman to put down on
+paper, from her recollections and from her old letters home, this simple
+story of a fine American life.  She consented finally to write fragments
+of her life, anonymously.  We were pledged not to reveal her identity.
+A few changes in geography and time were made in her manuscript, but
+otherwise the story is true to life, laden with adventure, spirit and
+the American philosophy.  She has refused to accept any remuneration for
+the magazine publication or for royalties on the book rights.  The money
+accruing from her labor is being set aside in The Central Union Trust
+Company of New York City as a trust fund to be used in some charitable
+work.  She has given her book to the public solely because she believes
+that it contains a helpful message for other women, It is the gracious
+gift of a woman who has a deep and passionate love for her country, and
+a tender responsiveness to the needs of her own sex.
+                                                  MARIE M. MELONEY.
+September 1, 1922.
+
+
+
+
+                      THE LOG-CABIN LADY
+
+I.                                                                     I
+
+I was born in a log cabin.  I came to my pioneer mother in one of
+Wisconsin's bitterest winters.
+
+Twenty-one years later I was sailing for England, the wife of a diplomat
+who was one of Boston's wealthy and aristocratic sons.
+
+The road between--well, let it speak for itself.  Merely to set this
+story on paper opens old wounds, deep, but mercifully healed these many
+years.  Yet, if other women may find here comfort and illumination and a
+certain philosophy, I am glad, and I shall feel repaid.
+
+The first thing I remember is being grateful for windows.  I was three
+years old.  My mother had set me to play on a mattress carefully placed
+in the one ray of sunlight streaming through the one glass window of our
+log cabin.  Baby as I was, I had ached in the agonizing cold of a
+pioneer winter.  Lying there, warmed by that blessed sunshine, I was
+suddenly aware of wonder and joy and gratitude.  It was gratitude for
+glass, which could keep out the biting cold and let in the warm sun.
+
+To this day windows give me pleasure.  My father was a school-teacher
+from New England, where his family had taught the three R's and the
+American Constitution since the days of Ben Franklin's study club.  My
+mother was the daughter of a hardworking Scotch immigrant.  Father's
+family set store on ancestry.  Mother's side was more practical.
+
+
+The year before my birth these two young people started West in a
+prairie schooner to stake a homestead claim.  Father's sea-man's chest
+held a dictionary, Bancroft's History of the United States, several
+books of mathematics, Plutarch's Lives, a history of Massachusetts,
+a leather-bound file of Civil War records, Thackeray's "Vanity Fair",
+Shakespeare in two volumes, and the "Legend of Sleepy Hollow." My mother
+took a Bible.
+
+I can still quote pages from every one of those books.  Until I was
+fourteen I saw no others, except a primer, homemade, to teach me my
+letters.  Because "Vanity Fair" contained simpler words than the others,
+it was given me first; so at the age of seven I was spelling out pages
+of the immortal Becky.
+
+My mother did not approve, but father laughed and protested that the
+child might as well begin with good things.
+
+After mother's eighth and last baby, she lay ill for a year.  The care
+of the children fell principally on my young shoulders.  One day I found
+her crying.
+
+"Mary," she said, with a tenderness that was rare, "if I die, you must
+take care of all your brothers and sisters.  You will be the only woman
+within eighteen miles."
+
+I was ten years old.
+
+That night and many other nights I lay awake, trembling at the
+possibility of being left the only woman within eighteen miles.
+
+But mother did not die.  I must have been a sturdy child; for, with the
+little help father and his homestead partner could spare, I kept that
+home going until she was strong again.
+
+Every fall the shoemaker made his rounds through the country, reaching
+our place last, for beyond us lay only virgin forest and wild beasts.
+His visit thrilled us more than the arrival of any king to-day.  We had
+been cut off from the world for months.  The shoemaker brought news from
+neighbors eighteen, forty, sixty, even a hundred and fifty miles away.
+Usually he brought a few newspapers too, treasured afterward for months.
+He remained, a royal guest, for many days, until all the family was
+shod.
+
+Up to my tenth birthday we could not afford the newspaper subscription.
+But after that times were a little better, and the Boston Transcript
+began to come at irregular intervals.  It formed our only tie with
+civilization, except for the occasional purely personal letter from
+"back home."
+
+
+When I was fourteen three tremendous events had marked my life: sunlight
+through a window-pane; the logrolling on the river when father added two
+rooms to our cabin; and the night I thought mother would die and leave
+me the only woman in eighteen miles.
+
+But the fourth event was the most tremendous.  One night father hurried
+in without even waiting to unload or water his team.  He seemed excited,
+and handed my mother a letter.  Our Great-Aunt Martha had willed father
+her household goods and personal belongings and a modest sum that to us
+was a fortune.  Some one back East "awaited his instructions."  Followed
+many discussions, but in the end my mother gained her way.  Great-Aunt
+Martha's house goods were sold at auction.  Father, however, insisted
+that her "personal belongings" be shipped to Wisconsin.
+
+
+After a long, long wait, one day father and I rose at daybreak and rode
+thirty-six miles in a springless wagon, over ranchmen's roads ("the
+giant's vertebrae," Jim Hill's men called it) to the nearest express
+station, returning with a trunk and two packing cases.  It was a solemn
+moment when the first box was opened.  Then mother gave a cry of
+delight.  Sheets and bedspreads edged with lace!  Real linen pillowcases
+with crocheted edgings.  Soft woolen blankets and bright handmade
+quilts.  Two heavy, lustrous table-cloths and two dozen napkins, one
+white set hemmed, and one red-and-white, bordered with a soft fringe.
+
+What the world calls wealth has come to me in after years.  Nothing ever
+equaled in my eyes the priceless value of Great-Aunt Martha's "personal
+belongings."
+
+I was in a seventh heaven of delight.  My father picked up the books
+and began to read, paying no attention to our ecstasies over dresses and
+ribbons, the boxful of laces, or the little shell-covered case holding a
+few ornaments in gold and silver and jet.
+
+We women did not stop until we had explored every corner of that trunk
+and the two packing boxes.  Then I picked up a napkin.
+
+"What are these for?" I asked curiously.
+
+My father slammed his book shut.  I had never seen such a look on his
+face.
+
+"How old are you, Mary?" he demanded suddenly.
+
+I told him that I was going on fifteen.
+
+"And you never saw a table napkin?"
+
+His tone was bitter and accusing.  I did n't understand--how could I?
+Father began to talk, his words growing more and more bitter.  Mother
+defended herself hotly.  To-day I know that justice was on her side.
+But in that first adolescent self-consciousness my sympathies were all
+with father.  Mother had neglected us--she had not taught us to use
+table napkins!  Becky Sharp used them.  People in history used them.
+I felt sure that Great-Aunt Martha would have been horrified, even in
+heaven, to learn I had never even seen a table napkin.
+
+Our parents' quarrel dimmed the ecstasy of the "personal belongings."
+From that time we used napkins and a table-cloth on Sundays--that is,
+when any one remembered it was Sunday.
+
+Great-Aunt Martha's napkins opened up a new world for me, and they
+strengthened father's determination to give his children an education.
+The September before I reached seventeen, we persuaded mother to let me
+go to Madison and study for a half year.
+
+So great was my eagerness to learn from books, that I had given no
+thought to people.  Madison, my first town, showed me that my clothes
+were homemade and tacky.  Other girls wore store shoes and what seemed
+to me beautifully made dresses.  I was a backwoods gawk.  I hated myself
+and our home.
+
+With many cautions, father had intrusted eighty dollars to me for the
+half year's expenses.  I took the money and bought my first pair of
+buttoned shoes and a store dress with nine gores and stylish mutton-leg
+sleeves! It was poor stuff, not warm enough for winter, and, together
+with a new coat and hat, made a large hole in my funds.
+
+I found work in a kindly family, where, in return for taking care of an
+old lady, I received room and board and two dollars a week.  Four hours
+of my day were left for school.
+
+The following February brought me an appointment as teacher in a
+district school, at eighteen dollars a month and "turnabout" boarding in
+farmers' families.
+
+The next two years were spent teaching and attending school in Madison.
+When I was twenty, a gift from father added to my savings and made
+possible the realization of one of my dreams.  I went East for a special
+summer course.
+
+No tubes shuttled under the Hudson in those days.  From the ferry-boat
+I was suddenly dazzled with the vision of a towering gold dome rising
+above the four and five-story structures.  The New York World building
+was then the tallest in the world.  To me it was also the most
+stupendous.
+
+Impulsively I turned to a man leaning on the ferry-boat railing beside
+me.  "Is n't that the most wonderful thing in the world?" I gasped.
+
+"Not quite," he answered, and looked at me.  His look made me
+uncomfortable.  I could have spoken to any stranger in Madison without
+embarrassment.  It took me about twenty years to understand why a plain,
+middle-aged woman may chat with a strange man anywhere on earth, while
+the same conversation cheapens a good-looking young girl.
+
+That summer I met my future husband.  He was doing research work at
+Columbia, and we ran across each other constantly in the library.  I
+fairly lived there, for I found myself, for the first time, among a
+wealth of books, and I read everything--autobiographies, histories, and
+novels good and bad.
+
+Tom's family and most of his friends were out of town for July and
+August.  I had never met any one like him, and he had never dreamed of
+any one like me.  We were friends in a week and sweethearts in a month.
+
+Instead of joining his family, Tom stayed in New York and showed me the
+town.  He took me to my first plays.  Even now I know that "If I Were
+King" and "The Idol's Eye", with Frank Daniels, were good.
+
+One day we went driving in an open carriage--his.  It was upholstered in
+soft fawn color, the coachman wore fawn-colored livery, and the horses
+were beautiful.  I was very happy.  When we reached my boarding house
+again, I jumped out.  I was used to hopping from spring wagons.
+
+"Please don't do that again, Mary," reproved Tom, very gently.  "You
+might hurt yourself."  That amused me, until a look from the coachman
+suddenly conveyed to me that I had made a /faux pas/.  Not long after I
+hurried off a street car ahead of Tom.  This time he said nothing, but I
+have not forgotten the look on his face.
+
+Over our marvelous meals in marvelous restaurants Tom delighted to get
+me started about home.  Great-Aunt Martha's "personal belongings" amused
+him hugely.  He never tired of the visiting shoemaker, nor of the
+carpenter who declared indignantly that if we wore decent clothes we
+wouldn't need our bench seats planed smooth.  But some things I never
+told--about the table napkins, for instance.
+
+
+We were married in September.  Our honeymoon we spent fishing and
+"roughing it" in the Canadian wilds.  I felt at home and blissful.
+I could cook and fish and make a bed in the open as well as any man.
+It was heaven; but it left me entirely unprepared for the world I was
+about to enter.
+
+Not once did Tom say: "Mary, we do this [or that] in our family."  He
+was too happy, and I suppose he never thought of it.  As for me, I
+wasted no worry on his family.  They would be kind and sympathetic and
+simple, like Tom.  They would love me and I would love them.
+
+The day after we returned from Canada to New York I spent looking over
+Tom's "personal belongings"--as great a revelation as Aunt Martha's.
+His richly bound books, his beautiful furniture, his pictures--
+everything was perfect.  That night Tom made an announcement: "The
+family gets home to-night, and they will come to call to-morrow."
+
+"Why don't we go to the station to meet them?" I suggested.
+
+To-day I appreciate better than I could then the gentle tact with which
+Tom told me his family was strong on "good form", and that the husband's
+family calls on the bride first.  My husband's family came, and I
+realized that I was a mere baby in a new world--a complicated and not
+very friendly world, at that.  Though they never put it into words, they
+made me understand, in their cruel, polite way, that Tom was the hope of
+the family, and his sudden marriage to a stranger had been a great
+shock, if not more.
+
+The beautiful ease of my husband's women-folk filled me with admiration
+and despair.  I felt guilty of something.  I was queer.  Their voices,
+the intonation, even the tilt of their chins, seemed to stamp these new
+"in-laws" as aristocrats of another race.  Yet the same old New England
+stock that sired their ancestors produced my father's fathers.
+
+Theirs had stayed in Boston, and had had time to teach their children
+grace and refinement and subtleties.  Mine fought for their existence in
+a new country.  And when men and women fight for existence life becomes
+very simple.
+
+
+I felt only my own misery that day.  Now I realize that the meeting
+between Tom's mother and his wife was a mutual misery.  I was crude.  No
+doubt, to her, I seemed even common.  With every one except Tom I seemed
+awkward and stupid.  Poor mother-in-law!
+
+When she rose to go, I saw her to her carriage.  She was extremely
+insistent that I should not.  But this was Tom's mother, and I was
+determined to leave no friendly act undone.  At home it would have been
+an offense not to see the company to their wagon.  Even in Madison we
+would have escorted a caller to his carriage.
+
+Again it was the coachman who with one chill look warned me that I had
+sinned.
+
+Before Tom came home that afternoon he called on his mother, so no
+explanations from me were necessary.  He knew it all, and doubtless much
+more than had escaped me.  Like the princely gentleman he always was,
+the poor boy tried to soften that after-noon's blows by saying social
+customs were stupid and artificial and I knew all the important things
+in life.  The other few little things and habits of his world he could
+easily tell me.
+
+Few--and little! There were thousands, and they loomed bigger each day.
+Moreover, Tom did not tell me.  Either, manlike, he forgot, or he was
+afraid of hurting my feelings.
+
+One of the few things Tom did tell me I was forever forgetting.  Napkins
+belonged to Sundays at home, and they were not washed often.  It was a
+long-standing habit, to save back-breaking work for mother, to fold my
+napkin neatly after meals.  Unlearning that and acquiring the custom of
+mussing up one's napkin and leaving it carelessly on the table was the
+meanest work of my life.
+
+Interesting guests came to Tom's house, and I would grow absorbed in
+their talk.  Not until we were leaving the table would I realize that my
+napkin lay neatly folded and squared in the midst of casually rumpled
+heaps.
+
+One night, years later, I sat between Jim Hill and Senator Bailey of
+Texas at a dinner.  Both men folded their napkins.  I loved them for it.
+
+
+During that first year Tom made up a little theater party for a
+classmate who had just married a Philadelphia girl.  With memories of
+Ben Franklin, William Penn, Liberty Bell, and all the grand old
+characters of the City of brotherly Love, I looked forward eagerly to
+making a new friend.
+
+The Philadelphian was even more languid than Tom's mother.  She chopped
+her words and there were no r's in her English.  I tried to break the
+ice by talking of the traditions of her city.  She was bored.  She knew
+only Philadelphia's social register.  Just to play tit for tat, twice
+during the evening I quoted from "Julius Caesar"--and scored!
+
+We had just settled down in old Martin's Restaurant for after-theater
+supper when two tall gentlemen entered the room.
+
+"There's Tom Platt and Chauncey Depew," remarked Tom's friend casually.
+
+United States senators are important people in Wisconsin--at least, they
+were when I was young.  If a senator visited our community, everybody
+turned out.  I knew much of both these men, and Tom had often spoken
+warmly of Depew.  As they approached our table, Tom and his friend both
+stood up.  Thrilled, I rose hastily.  My eyes were too busy to see Tom's
+face, and I did not realize until afterward that the only other woman
+had remained coolly seated.
+
+On our way home, Tom told me, in his gentle way, never to rise from a
+dining table to acknowledge an introduction even to a woman--or a
+senator.  That night a tormenting devil with the face of the other woman
+kept me awake.  For the first time since my marriage I felt homesick for
+the prairies.
+
+
+And then we were invited to visit Tom's Aunt Elizabeth in Boston and
+meet the whole family.  I was sick with dread.  I begged Tom to tell me
+some of the things I should and should not do.
+
+"Be your own sweet self and they 'll love you," he promised, kissing me.
+He meant it, dear soul; but I knew better.
+
+From the very first minute, Tom's Aunt Elizabeth made me conscious of
+her disapproval.  In after years I won the old lady's affection and real
+respect, but I never spent a completely happy hour in her presence.
+
+The night we arrived she gave me a formal dinner.  Some dozen additional
+guests dropped in later, and I was bewildered by new faces and strange
+names.  Later in the evening I noticed a distinguished-looking
+middle-aged gentleman standing alone just outside the drawing-room door.
+Hurrying out, I invited him to come in.  He inquired courteously if
+there was anything he could do for me.
+
+"Yes, indeed," I assured him.  "Come in and talk to me."  He looked shy
+and surprised.  I insisted.  Then Tom's aunt called me and, drawing me
+hastily into a corner, demanded why I was inviting a servant into her
+drawing-room.
+
+"Servant! He looks like a senator," I protested.  "He's dressed exactly
+like every other man at the party and he looks twice as important as
+most of them."
+
+"Didn't you notice he addressed you as 'Madam'?" pursued Aunt Elizabeth.
+
+"But it 's perfectly proper to call a married woman 'Madam.'
+Foreigners always do," I defended.
+
+"Can't you tell a servant when you see one?" inquired the old lady
+icily.
+
+I begged to know how one could.  All Boston was summed up in her answer:
+"You are supposed to know the other people."
+
+Tom's wife could have drowned in a thimble.
+
+
+The third day of our visit, we were at the dinner table, when I saw Aunt
+Elizabeth's face change--for the worse.  Her head went up higher and her
+upper lip drew longer.  Finally she turned to me.
+
+"Why do you cut your meat like a dog's dinner?" she snapped.
+
+Tom's protesting exclamation did not stop her.
+
+I laid my knife and fork on my plate and folded my hands in my lap to
+hide their trembling.
+
+Time may dim many hurts, but with the last flicker of intelligence I
+shall remember that scene.  Even then, in a flash, I saw the symbolism
+of it.
+
+On one side--rare mahogany, shining silver, deft servants, napkins to
+rumple, leisure for the niceties of life.  On the other hand--a log
+cabin, my tired mother with new babies always coming, father slaving to
+homestead a claim and push civilization a little farther over our
+American continent.
+
+A great tenderness for my parents filled my heart and overflowed in my
+eyes.  I have, I confess, had moments of bitterness toward them.  But
+that was not one of them.
+
+"I think I can tell you," I answered, as quietly as I could.  "It 's
+very simple.  I was the first baby, and mother cut up my food for me.
+After a while she cut up food for two babies.  By the time the third
+came, I had to do my own cutting.  Naturally, I did it just as mother
+had.  Then I began to help cut up food for the other babies.  It 's a
+baby habit.  And I must now learn to cut one bite at a time like a
+civilized grown person."
+
+Even Aunt Elizabeth was silenced.  But Tom rose from the table,
+swearing.  My father would not have permitted a cowpuncher to use such
+language before my mother.  But I loved Tom for it.
+
+However, I did not sleep that night.  Next morning Tom's Aunt Elizabeth
+apologized, and for Back Bay was really unbending.
+
+Some days later we returned to New York, and I thought my troubles were
+over for a time.  But the first night Tom came home full of excitement.
+He had been appointed to the diplomatic corps, and we were to sail for
+England within a month!
+
+The news struck chill terror to my heart.  With so much still to learn
+in my native America, what on earth should I do in English society?
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+More than two months passed after the night my husband announced his
+foreign appointment before we sailed for England.
+
+I planned to study and to have long talks with him about the customs of
+fashionable and diplomatic Europe, but alas!  I reckoned without the
+friends and pretended friends who claim the time of a man of Tom's
+importance.  Besides, he and I had so many other things to discuss.
+
+So the sailing time approached, and then he announced that we were to be
+presented at court! I was thrilled half with fear and half with joy.
+
+I remembered from my reading of history that some of England's kings had
+not spoken English and that French had been the court language.  I
+visited a bookstore and purchased what was recommended as an easy road
+to French, and spent all morning learning to say, "l'orange est un
+fruit."  I read the instructions for placing the tongue and puckering
+the lips and repeated les and las until I was dizzy.  Then I looked
+through our bookcases for a life of Benjamin Franklin.  I knew he had
+gone to court and "played with queens."
+
+But the great statesman-author-orator gave me no guide to correct form
+or English social customs.  Instead I grew so interested in the history
+of his work in England and France and in his inspiring achievement in
+obtaining recognition and credit for the United States that dinner time
+arrived before I realized I had not discovered what language was spoken
+at court, nor what one talked about, nor if one talked at all.
+
+Tom roared when I made my confession.  With his boyish good humor he
+promised to answer all my questions on board ship.
+
+So, without a care in those delicious days that followed, I wandered
+down Sixth Avenue to New York's then most correct shops, buying clothes
+and clothes and clothes.  I bought practical and impractical gifts for
+the twins back in Wisconsin and for all the family and those good
+friends who had helped me through Madison.
+
+The week before we sailed my husband said, out of a clear sky: "Be sure
+you have the right clothes, Mary.  The English are a conservative lot."
+Suddenly I was conscious again that I did not know the essential things
+the wife of a diplomat ought to know--what to wear and when, a million
+and one tremendous social trifles.
+
+The moment our magnificent liner left the dock I heaved a sigh of
+relief.  Tom would be mine for two whole weeks, and all the questions I
+had saved up would be answered.  That evening he announced: "We don't
+dress for dinner the first night out."
+
+"Dress for dinner?" I asked.  "What do you mean?"
+
+And then very gently he gave me my first lesson.  I had never seen
+anything bigger than a ferry-boat.  How could I guess that even on an
+ocean liner we did not leave formality behind?  The "party dresses",
+so carefully selected, the long, rich velvet cape I had thought
+outrageously extravagant, and the satin slippers and the suede--I had
+packed them all carefully in the trunk and sent them to the hold of the
+ship.  But, with the aid of a little cash, the steward finally produced
+my treasure trunk, and thereafter I dressed for dinner.
+
+The two weeks I had expected my husband to give me held no quiet hours.
+There is no such thing, except when one is seasick, as being alone
+aboard a ship.  Tom was popular, good at cards and deck games, always
+ready to play.  And the fourth day out I was too ill to worry about the
+customs at the Court of St. James.
+
+It was not until just before we reached England that I began to feel
+myself again.  I stood on deck, thrilled with the tall ships and the
+steamers, the fishing smacks and the smaller craft in Southampton
+harbor.
+
+"What will be the first thing you do in London?" somebody asked me.
+
+"Go to Mayfair to find the home of Becky Sharp," I answered.  Becky
+Sharp was as much a part of English history to me as Henry VIII or Anne
+Boleyn or William the Conqueror.  When my husband and I were alone he
+said: "I think they have picked out No. 21 Curzon Street as the house
+where Becky Sharp is supposed to have lived.  But what a funny thing for
+you to want to see first!"
+
+I remembered what old Lord Steyne had said to Becky: "You poor little
+earthen pipkin.  You want to swim down the stream with great copper
+kettles.  All women are alike.  Everybody is striving for what is not
+worth the having."
+
+I was quite sure I did not want to drift down the stream with copper
+kettles.  I only wanted to be with Tom, to see England with him, to
+enjoy Dr. Johnson's haunts, to go to the "Cheddar Cheese" and the
+Strand, to Waterloo Bridge, and down the road the Romans built before
+England was England.
+
+I wanted to see the world without the world seeing me.  In my heart was
+no desire to be a copper kettle.  But I had been cast into the stream,
+and down it I must go, like a little fungus holding to the biggest
+copper kettle I knew.
+
+I told my husband this.  It was the first time he had been really
+irritated with me.  "Why do you worry about these things?" he protested.
+"You have a good head and a good education.  You are the loveliest woman
+in England.  Be your own natural self and the English will love you."
+But I remembered another occasion when he had told me to be my own
+natural sweet self.
+
+"How about what happened to Becky?" I asked.
+
+Tom went into a rage.  "Why do you insist on comparing yourself with
+that little -----!" The word he used was an ugly one.  I did not speak
+to him again until after we had passed the government inspectors.
+
+
+I shall never forget my first day in London, the old, quiet city where
+everybody seemed so comfortable and easy-going.  There was no show, no
+pretense.  The people in the shops and on the street bore the earmarks
+of thrift.  I understood where New England got its spirit.
+
+The first morning at the Alexandra Hotel, Tom fell naturally into the
+European habit of having coffee and fruit and a roll brought to his bed.
+I wanted to go down to the dining room.  My husband said it was not done
+and I would be lonesome.  The days of ranch life had taught me to get up
+with the chickens.  But it was not done in London.  The second morning
+the early sun was too much for me.  I dressed, left the hotel, and
+walked for several hours before a perfect servant brought shining plates
+and marmalade, fruit and coffee to my big husky football player's
+bedside.  I have lived many years in Europe, but I have never grown used
+to having breakfast brought to my room.
+
+That second rainy morning Tom left me alone with the promise of being
+back for luncheon.  I picked up a London morning paper and glanced at
+the personal column.  I have read it every day since when I could get
+hold of the London Times.  All of human nature and the ups and downs of
+man are there, from secondhand lace to the mortgaged jewels of
+broken-down nobility, from sporting games and tickets for sale to
+relatives wanted, and those mysterious, suggestive, unsigned messages
+from home or to home.  I read the news of the war.  We in America did
+not know there was a war.  But Greece and Crete were at each other's
+throats, and Turkey was standing waiting to crowd the little ancient
+nation into Armenia or off the map.  There was the Indian famine--We did
+not talk about it at home, but it had first place in the London paper.
+And the Queen's birthday,--it was to be celebrated by feeding the poor
+of East London and paying the debts of the hospitals.  There was
+something so humane, so kindly, so civilized about it all!  "I love
+England," I said, and that first impression balanced the scale many a
+time later when I did not love her.
+
+
+The third or fourth day brought an invitation to dine at a famous house
+on Grosvenor Square--with a duke!
+
+I pestered my husband with questions.  What should I wear?  What should
+I talk about?  He just laughed.
+
+The paper had reported a "levee ordered by the queen", describing the
+gowns and jewels worn by the ladies.
+
+I had little jewelry--a diamond ring, which Tom gave me before we were
+married, a bracelet, two brooches, and a string of gold beads, which
+were fashionable in America.  I put them all on with my best bib and
+tucker.  When we were dressed, Tom gave me one look and said, "Why do
+you wear all that junk?"  I took off one of the brooches and the string
+of gold beads.
+
+When our carriage drew up to the house on Grosvenor Square, liveried
+servants stood at each side of the door, liveried servants guided us
+inside.  There was a gold carpet, paintings of ladies and gentlemen in
+gorgeous attire, and murals and tapestries in the marble halls.  But I
+quickly forgot all of this grandeur listening to the names of guests
+being called off as they entered the drawing-room: Mr. Gladstone and
+Mrs. Gladstone, Lord Rosebery and the Marquis of Salisbury, Mrs. Humphry
+Ward, looking fatter and older than I had expected, officers, colonels,
+viscounts, and ladies, and then Tom and Mary--but they were not called
+off that way.  I wanted to meet Mr. Gladstone, and hoped I might even be
+near him at dinner; but I sat between a colonel and a young captain of
+the Scots Greys.
+
+
+Mr. Gladstone was on the other side of the table.  It was a huge table,
+more than five feet wide and very long.  My husband was somewhere out of
+sight at the other end.  Mr. Gladstone mentioned the fund being raised
+for the victims of the Paris Opera Comique fire.  It is good form to be
+silent in the presence of death, especially when death is colossal, and
+the English never fail to follow good form.  There was a sudden lull at
+our end of the table.
+
+It was I who broke that silence.  I was touched by the generosity of
+England, and said so.  Since my arrival I had daily noted that England
+was giving to India, sending relief to Greece and Armenia, raising a
+fund for the fire sufferers, and celebrating the Queen's Jubilee by
+feeding the poor.  I addressed my look and my admiring words to Mr.
+Gladstone.
+
+Either my sincerity or the embarrassment he knew would follow my
+disregard of "the thing that is done" moved Mr. Gladstone's sympathy.
+He smiled across the table at me and answered, "I am so glad you see
+these good points of England."  It was about the most gracious thing
+that was ever done to me in my life.  In England it is bad form to speak
+across the table.  One speaks to one's neighbor on the right or to one's
+neighbor on the left; but the line across the table is foreign soil and
+must not be shouted across.
+
+That night my husband said: "I forgot to tell you.  They never talk
+across the table in England." I chided him, and with some cause.  I had
+soon discovered that in England, as in America, it was not enough to be
+"my own natural self."  But I came to love Mr. Gladstone.  Long after
+that I told him the story of Mrs. Grant, who, when an awkward young man
+had broken one of her priceless Sevres after-dinner coffee cups, dropped
+hers on the floor to meet him on the same level.  "Any woman who, to put
+any one at ease, will break a priceless Sevres cup is heroic," I said.
+His answer, though flippant, was pleasant: "Any man who would not smile
+across the table at a lovely woman is a fool."
+
+Mr. Gladstone always wore a flower in his button-hole, a big, loose
+collar that never fitted, a floppy black necktie, and trousers that
+needed a valet's attention.  He was the greatest combination of
+propriety and utter disregard of conventions I had ever seen.
+
+The event next in importance to a presentation at court was a tea at
+which the tea planter Sir Thomas Lipton was one of the guests.  He was
+not Sir Thomas then, but was very much in the limelight, having
+contributed twenty-five thousand pounds to the fund collected by the
+Princess of Wales to feed the poor of London in commemoration of Queen
+Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.
+
+The Earl of Lathom, then the Lord Chamberlain, who looked like Santa
+Claus and smiled like Andrew Carnegie, was among the guests; so were Mr.
+and Mrs. Gladstone.  Since the night he had talked to me across the
+table I always felt that Mr. Gladstone was my best friend in England.
+He had a sense of humor, so I said: "Is there anything pointed in asking
+the tea king to a tea?"  That amused Gladstone.  He could not forgive
+Lipton parting his hair in the middle.
+
+That night I repeated my joke to Tom.  Instead of smiling, he said:
+"That's not the way to get on in England.  It 's too Becky Sharpish."
+
+
+And then came the day of the queen's salon.  Victoria did not often have
+audiences, the Prince of Wales or some other member of the royal family
+usually holding levees and receiving presentations in her name.
+
+Tom had warned me that there were certain clothes to be worn at a
+presentation.  I asked one of my American friends at the embassy, who
+directed me to a hairdresser--the most important thing, it seemed, being
+one's head.  She told me also to wear full evening dress, with long
+white gloves, and to remove the glove of the right hand.
+
+The hairdresser asked about my jewels.  Remembering what Tom had said
+about "junk", I said I would wear no jewels.  She was horrified, I would
+have to wear some, she insisted, if only a necklace of pearls.  She
+tactfully suggested that if my jewels had not arrived I could rent them
+from Mr. Somebody on the Strand.  It was frequently done, she said, by
+foreigners.
+
+My friend at the embassy was politely surprised that Tom's wife would
+think of renting real or imitation jewels.  In the end I insisted upon
+going without jewels.  I had the required plumes in my hair, and the
+veil that was correct form at court, and my lovely evening gown and
+pearl-embroidered slippers, which were to me like Cinderella's at the
+ball.
+
+Before I left the hotel I asked Tom to look at me critically.  I was
+still young--very young, very much in love, and unacquainted with the
+ways of the world, and so heaven came down into my heart when Tom took
+me into his arms and, kissing me, said: "There was never such a lovely
+queen."
+
+It was about three o'clock when we reached the Pimlico entrance.
+Guards were on duty, and men who looked like princes or very important
+personages in costume, white stockings, black pumps, buckles, breeches,
+and gay coats, stood at the door.  Inside the hall a gold carpet
+stretched to the marble stairs.  It was a wonderful place, and I wanted
+to stop and look.  I was conscious of being a "rubber-neck."  I might
+never see another palace again.
+
+We were guided up wonderful stairs and led into a sumptuous room, where,
+with the other guests, we waited for the arrival of the queen and the
+royal family.  No one does anything or says anything at a salon.  A
+"drawing-room" is a sacred rite in England.  It is recorded on the first
+page of the news, taking precedence over wars, decisions of supreme
+courts, famines, and international controversies.  Her Majesty receives.
+To the Englishman, to be presented at court is to be set up in England
+as class, to be worshiped by those who have not been in the presence of
+the queen, and to pay a little more to the butcher and milliner.
+
+I should have loved that "drawing-room" if I could have avoided the
+presentation.  It was an impressive picture--the queen with a face like
+a royal coin, a fine, generous forehead and beautiful nose, her
+intelligent and kindly eyes, her ample figure, her dignity come from
+long, long years of rule.  Back of her the Prince of Wales and the Prime
+Minister, who in later years I found myself always comparing to little
+Mr. Carnegie, the Viscount Curzon with his royal look, and in the
+foreground Sir S. Ponsonby-Fane, in white silk stockings, pumps and
+buckles, with sword and gold lace, and high-collared swallow-tailed
+coat.  I admired the queen's black moire dress, her headdress of
+priceless lace, her diamonds, her high-necked dress held together with
+more diamonds, and her black gloves, in striking contrast to our own.  I
+was enjoying the picture.
+
+Then my name was called.
+
+
+I had been thinking such kindly things of England--Mr. Balfour fighting
+for general education; Mr. Gladstone struggling to make England push
+Turkey back and save Greece; all England raising money for the fire
+sufferers of Paris and the Indian famine.  What a humanitarian race they
+were!  I felt as pro-England as any of the satellites in that room, and
+almost as much awed.  But back of it all was a natural United States
+be-natural-as-you-were-born impulse.  Neither Back Bay Boston nor Tom's
+Philadelphia friends had been able to repress it.  When my name was
+called and I stepped up, I made the little bow I had practised for hours
+the day before and that morning; and then, as I looked into the eyes of
+the queen, I held out my hand!  It was the instinctive action of a
+free-born American.
+
+I have realized in the years since what a real queen she was.  Smiling,
+she extended her hand--but not to be touched.  It was a little wave, a
+little imitation of my own impulsive outstretching to a friend; then her
+eyes went to the next person, and I was on my way, having been presented
+at court and done what "is not done" in England.
+
+Tom's mission in England was important.  He had friends, and there were
+distinguished people in England who regarded him and his family of
+sufficient value to "take us aboard."  They were most gracious and
+kindly.  But Tom's eyes were not smiling.
+
+
+That night my husband said some very frank things to me.  His position,
+and even the credit of our country to some extent, depended upon our
+conduct.  He did not say he was ashamed of me, and in my heart I do not
+think he was; but he regretted that I had not been trained in the little
+things upon which England put so much weight.  He suggested my employing
+a social secretary.
+
+"What I need, Tom," I said, "is a teacher.  You have told me these
+customs are not important.  They are important.  I need some one to
+teach them to me, and I propose to get a teacher."
+
+In the personal columns of the Times I had read this advertisement:
+
+         'A lady of aristocratic birth and social training
+          desires to be of service to a good-paying guest.'
+
+I swallowed my pride and answered it.  I was not her paying guest, but I
+employed this Scotch lady of aristocratic birth and social experience.
+
+On the first day at luncheon, which we ate privately in my apartment,
+she said: "In England a knife is held as you hold a pen, the handle
+coming up above the thumb and between the thumb and first finger."  My
+sense of humor permitted me to ask, after trying it once, "What do you
+do when the meat is tough?"  The Scotch aristocrat never smiled.  "It is
+n't," she answered.
+
+I was humiliated and a little soul-sick before that luncheon ended.
+I had been told to break each bite of my bread; a lady never bites a
+piece of bread.  I had been told to use a knife to separate my fish,
+when I had learned, oh, so carefully, in America to eat fish with a fork
+and a piece of bread.  I might have laughed about it all had not so much
+been at stake, even Tom's respect.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The Scotch lady of aristocratic birth and social experience lived with
+me one terrible week.  On the seventh day I came home from shopping with
+presents for the twins back in Wisconsin.  A day or so earlier, while my
+mentor was out of the room, I had asked the chef waiter of our floor
+about himself and his family, and found that his family too included
+twins.  So with the present for my family I also brought some for his.
+
+Mr. MacLeod, the member of Parliament from Scotland, and Lord Lansdowne
+happened to be calling when I arrived, and Tom and the Scotch lady were
+there.  The chef waiter was taking the coats of the gentlemen callers.
+I received the guests, acknowledged the introductions, and then, as I
+removed my own coat, I handed him the little package.
+
+When we were alone the Scotch lady turned to me.  "In England," she
+said, "ladies never converse with their servants, particularly in the
+presence of guests."
+
+Then she sealed her doom.  "Ladies never make gifts to their servants,"
+she added.  "Their secretaries, housekeepers, or companions disburse
+their bounty."
+
+I remembered the old U. S. A.  An American chef waiter might hope to be
+the father of a President.  On the ranch I had cooked for men of less
+education and much worse manners than this domestic who brought my
+athletic husband's breakfast to his bedside and who happened to be the
+proud father of twins.
+
+I would learn table manners from an English lady of aristocratic birth
+and social experience; but when it came to the human act of a little
+gift to a faithful servant, I declared my American independence.
+
+I was homesick for Wisconsin, homesick for real and simple people.
+I wanted to go home!  That night Tom and I had our first real quarrel,
+and it was over my dismissal of the Scotch lady of aristocratic birth.
+Life became intolerable for a while.  I dragged through days of bitter
+homesickness.  Nothing seemed real.  No one seemed sincere.  Life was a
+stage.  Everybody seemed to be acting a part and speaking their pieces
+with guttural voices.  Even my husband's voice sounded different--or
+else I realized for the first time that Boston apes London English.  Tom
+had learned his mother tongue in Boston, and now suddenly he seemed like
+a foreigner to me simply because he spoke like these other foreigners.
+The sun went out of my heaven.  I was dumb with loneliness and sick with
+the fear of lost faith.  Could it be that my husband was affecting these
+English mannerisms?  Certainly he seemed at home in England, while I
+seemed to be adrift, alone in an arctic ocean.
+
+I had no friend in England, and more and more my husband's special work
+was engrossing him.  When we were together I felt tongue-tied.  He had
+tried to be gentle with me; but I was strange in this world of his, and
+lonely and sensitive.  I had dreamed so much of this world, and now that
+I was in it, it was false and petty.  I longed for the United States,
+for my Northwest, for my hills and wide, far plains.  I wanted to meet
+somebody from Madison who smiled like a friend.
+
+One day Tom looked at me searchingly, and said I must be ill.
+
+I confessed to a little homesickness.  Tom became very attentive.
+He took me sightseeing.  We lunched at the quaint inn where Dickens
+found his inspiration for "Pickwick Papers" and where the literary
+lights of London foregathered and still foregather for luncheon.  We sat
+in one of the cozy little stalls--just Tom and I.
+
+Suddenly it swept over me that life had gone all wrong.  Here was a
+dream come true, and no joy in my heart.  Tom asked me for my thoughts.
+I told him, quite frankly, I was thinking of home.  I was thinking of
+mother in her cotton house dress with her knitted shawl around her
+shoulders, of father in his jeans and high boots tramping over the range
+with the men; I saw the cow and the pigs and the chickens, the smelly
+corral and the water hole, the twins trying to rub each other's face in
+the mud.  And I was thinking--Tom would n't fit into my world, and I
+could not belong to his.  That was the second time I heard Tom swear.
+He wanted to know what kind of a snob I thought he was.  He'd be as much
+at home with dad on the ranch as he was in London.  "The fault is with
+you," he said.  "You 're not adaptable, and you don't try to be."
+
+Tom did n't understand.  He never did.  In all the years together, which
+he made so rich and happy, Tom never understood how hard and bitter a
+school was that first year of my married life.  But Tom did try to give
+me a good time in London.  He took me to interesting places and we were
+entertained by a number of people, mostly ponderous and stupid.  Tom did
+not suggest that we entertain in our turn.  I think he felt I was not
+ready for it, although even in after years, when we talked frankly about
+many things, he would never admit this.
+
+I shall never forget my first week-end party in England.  I was not
+well, and Tom, manlike, felt sure the change, a trip down to Essex and
+new people, would do me good.  The thought of the country and a visit
+with some good simple country folk appealed to me too, so I packed the
+bags and met Tom at Victoria Station at eleven o'clock.  Alas! It is a
+far cry from a Montana ranch to a gentleman's estate in England!  My
+vision of a quiet visit "down on a farm" vanished the minute we stepped
+off the train.  Liveried coachmen collected our baggage.  They seemed to
+be discussing something; then I heard Tom say: "I guess that 's all.
+I 'll wire back for the rest of it."
+
+
+We were led to a handsome cart drawn by a fine tandem team, and Tom and
+I were alone for a minute.
+
+"My God, Mary!" he burst out, "didn't you bring any clothes for us?"
+
+"I certainly have," I retorted, sure I was in the right this time.
+"Your nightshirt and my nightgown; your toilet articles and mine; a
+change of underclothes; a clean shirt and two collars for you, and my
+new striped silk waist."
+
+I shall never forget Tom's expression.
+
+"Do you know where we are going?" he groaned.  "To one of the grandest
+houses in England!  Oh, Lord! I ought to have told you.  You 'll need
+all the clothes you have down here.  And--and a valet and maid will
+unpack the bags--oh, hell!"  After more of the same kind of talk, he
+began to cook up some yarn to tell the valet.
+
+Suddenly all that is free-born in me rose to the surface.  "Is it the
+thing for gentlemen to be afraid of the valet?" I asked my husband.
+"Does a servant regulate your life and set your standards?"
+
+Tom was quiet for several moments; then he took my hand and said very
+earnestly: "Mary, don't you ever lose your respect for the real things.
+It will save both of us."  After a while he added: "Just the same, I 'll
+have to lie out of this baggage hole."
+
+He did, in a very casual, laughing way--such a positive set of lies that
+I marveled and began to wonder how much of Tom was acting and how much
+was real.
+
+Tom went back to London on the next train, and reached the "farm" with
+our baggage before it was time to dress for the eight-o'clock dinner.
+
+The dinner was long and stupid.  After dinner the women went into the
+drawing-room and gossiped about politics and personalities until the men
+joined them, when they sat down to cards.  I did not know how to play
+cards, and so was left with a garrulous old woman who had eaten and
+drunk over-much.
+
+
+It had been a long day for me.  I was ill and tired.  Suddenly sleep
+began to overpower me.  I batted my eyes to keep them open.  I tried
+looking at the crystal lights, but my leaden eyes could not face them.
+The constant drone of that old woman was putting me to sleep.  I tried
+to say a few words now and then to wake myself.  I felt myself slipping.
+Once my head dropped and came up with a jerk.  I watched the great
+French clock.  Its hands did not seem to move.  I looked at Tom.  He was
+absorbed in his game.  I could not endure it another minute.  I went
+over and said good night to my hostess who had spoken to me only once
+since my arrival.
+
+Drowsy as I was, I noticed she seemed surprised.  "Oh, no," I told her;
+"I am not ill, only very sleepy."
+
+How good my pillow felt!
+
+The next morning Tom was cross.  I had made a /faux pas/.  I had shown I
+was bored and peeved and had gone to bed before the hostess indicated it
+was bedtime.  It "was n't done" in England.
+
+"What do you do if you can't keep awake?" I asked.  "You slip out
+quietly, go to your room ask a maid to call you after you have had forty
+winks, then you go back and pretend you are having a good time," said
+Tom.
+
+There were some bitter hours after we got back to London.  But Tom won,
+and I promised to get a companion.  Then there came into my life the
+most wonderful of friends.  She was the widow of a British Army officer
+who had been killed in India, and her only child was dead.  She was a
+woman of education and heart; she understood my needs, all of them, and
+I interested her.  She had seen great suffering; she had a deep feeling
+for humanity and an honest desire to be of use in the world.  In the
+English register my companion was listed as the Honorable Evelyn, but we
+quickly got down to Mary and Eve.  We loved each other.  Eve went to
+France with us a few months later.  She made me talk French with her.
+My first formal dinner in France was a pleasant surprise.  It was like a
+great family party--not dull and quiet like the English dinner, and ever
+so much more fun.  Everybody participated.  If there was one lion at the
+table, everybody shared him.
+
+
+There is something in being born on a silken couch.  Nothing surprises
+you.  You are at ease anywhere in the world.  Eve fitted into Paris as
+naturally as in her native London, I began to feel at home there myself.
+It was a city of happy people--care free, natural, sympathetic.  There
+was a lack of restraint which, after the oppressive dignity of London,
+was a rare treat.  No one was critical.  Every one accepted my halting
+and faulty French without ridicule or condescension.  The amiability and
+the friendliness of the French people thawed my heart and began to lift
+me out of my slough of homesickness.  Happiness came back to me.
+
+There had been hours in England when only the knowledge that a woman's
+rarest gift was coming to me, and that Tom was proud and happy about it,
+kept me from running away--back to the simple life of my own United
+States.
+
+I was homesick for mother.  Babies were a mystery to me, although I had
+helped mother with all of hers.  We had buried three of them in homemade
+coffins--pioneering is a ruthless scythe, and only the fit survive.  I
+began to understand my mother and the glory in the character which never
+faltered, although she was alone and life had been hard.  How could I
+whine when I had Tom and a good friend--and life was like a playground?
+
+I loved the French.  They regard life with a frankness which sometimes
+shocked my reserved Boston husband.  He never accepted intimacy.  The
+restraint of old England was still in his blood.  The free winds of the
+prairie had swept it from mine.
+
+My new friends in Paris discovered my happy secret.  It was my
+all-absorbing thought, and I was delighted to be able to discuss it
+frankly.  Motherhood is the great and natural event in the life of a
+woman in France, and no one makes a secret of it.  I was very happy in
+Paris.  And then--Tom had to go to Vienna.
+
+Not even Tom, Eve, and the promised baby could make me happy there.  In
+all the world I had seen no place where the line of class distinction
+was so closely drawn, where social customs were so rigid and court forms
+so sacred, as at the Austrian capital.  Learning the social customs of
+Vienna seemed as endless as counting the pebbles on the beach--and about
+as useful.  The clock regulated our habits in Vienna.  Up to eleven
+o'clock certain attire was proper.  If your watch stopped you were sure
+to break a social law.  I once saw a distinguished diplomat in distress
+because he found himself at an official function at eleven-thirty with a
+black tie--or without one, I have forgotten which!
+
+At first it offended me to receive an invitation--or a command--to
+appear at a formal function, with an accompanying slip telling exactly
+what to wear.  Then I laughed about it.
+
+Finally I rebelled.  On the plea of ill health, I made Tom do the social
+honors for me, while Eve and I did the museums and the galleries and the
+music fetes.  Years later I went back to Vienna, and I did not discredit
+my country.  But I never loved the city.  I enjoyed its art, its
+fascinating shops, its picturesque streets and people, and its beautiful
+women.  But for me Vienna has the faults of France and England, the
+poverty and arrogance of London, and the frivolity of Paris, without
+their redeeming qualities.
+
+
+So I was glad to return to England.  The second day in London, Tom took
+me to an exhibition important in the art world, or at least in the
+official life of London.  Everybody who was somebody was there.  I saw
+the Princess of Wales and the Marquis of Salisbury, who was then
+Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.  I saw Mr. Balfour, so handsome
+and gracious that I refused to believe there had ever been cause to call
+him "Bloody Balfour."  There was something kingly about him--yet he was
+simply Mr. Balfour.  Years afterward I realized that to know Mr. Balfour
+is either to worship him or hate him.  No one takes the middle course.
+I had begun to have a beautiful time that afternoon.
+
+I felt happy, acutely conscious of my blessings and of one coming
+blessing in particular.  Mr. Gladstone joined us, and Sir Henry Irving
+came over to speak to Eve.  She told him I had just said that England
+had a mold for handsome men.  Irving was interesting and striking,
+though certainly not handsome; but he took the compliment to himself,
+smiled, bowed his thanks, and said:
+
+"And America for beautiful women."
+
+Mr. Gladstone, too, could indulge in small talk.  "You should have seen
+her rosy cheeks before she went to the Continent," he said, and added
+kindly that I looked very tired and should go down to Hawarden Castle
+and rest.
+
+"Oh," I explained happily, "it is n't that--I 'm not tired.  It is such
+a happy reason!"  I felt Eve gasp.  Mr. Gladstone opened his kind eyes
+very wide, and his heavy chin settled down in his collar.  It was the
+last bad break I made.  But it was a blessing to me, for it robbed all
+social form of terror.  For the first time, I realized that custom is
+merely a matter of geography.  One takes off one's shoes to enter the
+presence of the ruler of Persia.  One wears a black tie until eleven
+o'clock in Vienna--or does n't.  One uses fish knives in England until
+he dines with royalty--then one must manage with a fork and a piece of
+bread.  One dresses for dinner always, and waits for the hostess to say
+it is time, and speaks only to one's neighbor at table.  In France one
+guest speaks to any or all of the others; all one's friends extend
+congratulations if a baby is coming; one shares all his joys with
+friends.  But in England nobody must know, and everybody must be
+surprised.  No one ever speaks of himself in England.  They are
+sensitive about everything personal.  But there is an underground and
+very perfect system by which everything about everybody is known and
+noised about and discussed with everybody except the person in question.
+It is a mysterious and elaborate hypocrisy.
+
+
+With the aid of Eve, I made a thorough study of the geography of social
+customs.  I learned the ways of Europe, of the Orient, and of South
+America.  It is easier to understand races if one understands the
+psychology of their customs.  I realized that social amenities are too
+often neglected in America, and our manners sometimes truthfully called
+crude.  But I told myself with pride that our truly cultivated people
+will not tolerate a social form that is not based on human, kindly
+instincts.  It was not until the World War flooded Europe with American
+boys and girls that I realized the glory of our social standards and the
+great need to have our own people understand those standards.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+Fear is the destroyer of peace.  I knew no peace until I learned not to
+be afraid of conventions.  The three most wretched years in my life
+might easily have been avoided by a little training at home or at
+school.
+
+I realize now the unhappiness of those first years of my married life.
+I was awkward and ill at ease in a world that valued social poise above
+knowledge.  From my childhood I had loved honest, sincere people.  After
+my marriage I met distinguished men and women, even a few who might be
+called great; but they, too, had their affectations and petty vanities.
+Being young, I judged them harshly because they set what I considered
+too much store upon absurd conventions.
+
+In the course of my travels since, I have come to realize that social
+customs are a simple matter of geography!  What is proper in England is
+bad form in France, and many customs that were correct in Vienna would
+be intolerable in Spain.  In the formal circles of Vienna no one spoke
+to anybody without an introduction.  In Spain there was a more subtle
+and truly aristocratic standard.  The assumption was that anybody one
+met in the home of one's host was desirable, and it was courtesy,
+therefore, to begin a conversation with any guest.  This is the attitude
+also in parts of France.
+
+But in those first months I had not acquired my philosophy.  I lived
+through homesick days, and some that were hard and bitter.  I stayed
+with Tom that first year only because I was too bewildered to take any
+initiative, and because I kept hoping that things would right themselves
+and I would wake out of my nightmare.  My baby came in the second year,
+and then I could not go home.  The simple life of my own people slipped
+very, very far away.  We made a hurried trip back to the United States
+that summer, but Tom would not consent to my going West.  His own family
+wanted to see our baby, and they decided that the little fellow had
+traveled enough and should not be subjected to the hardships of a
+cross-country train trip.  So Tom sent for mother and the twins to come
+to us, and they arrived at the Waldorf Hotel, where we were staying.
+Dear, simple mother, in her terrible clothes, and the twins, got up with
+more thought for economy than for beauty!  I shopped extravagantly with
+them.  The youngsters wanted to see everything in New York; but mother,
+despite all of those hard, lonely years in our rough country and the
+many interesting things for her to do and see in New York--mother wanted
+nothing better than to stay with the baby.
+
+
+With all the children she had brought into this world one might think
+she had seen enough of babies.  But she adored my little son.  How near
+she seemed to me then!  How hungry I had been for her, without realizing
+it!  I felt that she loved my baby boy as she had never loved me or any
+of her own children.  And I understood why mother never had had time to
+love her own babies.  In the struggle for existence of those hard years
+she had never had a minute to indulge in the pure joy of having her
+baby.  I sat watching her with her first grandchild, so sweet in his
+exquisite hand-sewn little clothes, and suddenly I found myself crying
+hysterically.
+
+Mother was very dear to me from that day.  Later in this chronicle I
+want to give a chapter to my mother and what we both suffered during
+this period of her visit to New York, for it marked the climax of my own
+development.  When mother and the children started off on their return
+trip to the West, Tom sent them flowers and candy and fruit.  He had
+already generously put financial worry away from my family for all time,
+but I knew that he was a little ashamed of some of mother's crudities.
+I wondered why I did not feel ashamed.  I was very, very glad I did not.
+It gave me something tangible to cling to--a sure consciousness of
+power, that comes of knowing one possesses the true pride to rise above
+the opinions of other people.
+
+I would have given my life, that day, to be able to assure my family
+that material security which they owed to my husband, who neither loved
+nor understood them.  I looked down the years and saw myself crushed by
+a burden of indebtedness to a man I felt I no longer loved.  Only
+mother's grateful, simple happiness eased my hurt.  I had never
+approached my mother, but I knew now that if her natural dignity and
+great, kind heart had been given the advantages that the women in my
+husband's family took as a matter of course, she would have been
+superior to them all.  Yet they barely tolerated mother--no more.
+
+I longed to go home to my own warm, hearty, open West.  I stood on the
+ferry after they had gone, thinking that, if my family were not so
+deeply indebted to my husband, I would leave him.  I suppose I did not
+really mean that thought, but it made me unhappy.  I felt disloyal and
+dishonest.  Finally I told Tom.  There was a scene; but from that day he
+began to understand me, and things were better.  A few days later we
+came home from a dinner party, and, after going to the baby's room for a
+minute, Tom asked me to stay and talk.  But he did not talk.  For a long
+time he sat smoking and thinking.  I knew he had something on his mind,
+and I waited.  Finally I realized that he was embarrassed.
+
+"Can I help? Is it something I have done that has embarrassed you?" I
+asked.
+
+
+That was many years ago, but I can never forget the look Tom gave me.
+It held all the love of our courtship and something besides that I had
+never seen in his face before.
+
+"For God's sake, never say that to me again!" he cried.  "Embarrassed
+me! I am proud of you--you never can know how proud.  I was sitting here
+trying to think how to tell you something my mother said about you, and
+just what it means."
+
+His mother!  My heart dropped.  His mother had never said anything about
+me, excepting criticism.  I had been a bitter disappointment to her.
+Whatever she said would be politely cruel--at best, a damning with faint
+praise.
+
+"She said," my husband went on, "that she is very happy in our marriage,
+completely satisfied, and that she has come to be proud of you.  I don't
+know how to tell you just what that means."
+
+I knew.  I knew his mother could have given me no higher praise.  I had
+learned what to her were the essentials; I had cultivated the manner she
+placed above price.  But the realization brought self-distrust.  Had I
+lost my honesty and sincerity?
+
+Tom went on to tell me that his mother had particularly admired my
+attitude toward my own mother, and the manner in which I met every
+little failing of hers.  She felt I had a sense of true values in
+people, and that the simplicity and sureness with which I had met this
+situation was the essence of good breeding.
+
+I had not thought it possible that Tom's mother could understand my
+feeling for my mother and my honest pride in her real worth.  Perhaps,
+I reflected, I had been unjust to my mother-in-law.  I knew what a shock
+I had been to her in the early days of our marriage, and I knew only too
+well that even Tom had often regretted my ignorance of social usages.
+
+They are simple customs, and should be taught in every school in
+America, but I had not learned them.  I was happy that night and for
+days afterward.
+
+Then we went back to Europe.  Tom knew people on the steamer to whom I
+took a dislike.  They were bold and even vulgar, and Tom admitted that
+he did not admire them.  I made up my mind we should avoid them.  The
+next afternoon I found Tom and that group walking the deck arm in arm,
+chatting affably.  When we were alone, I asked Tom how he could do it.
+I know now that a man cannot hold an official position like Tom's and
+ignore politically important people.  But he only said rather
+carelessly, and with a laugh, that it was one of the prices a man pays
+for public office.
+
+
+After that I noticed that my husband was known to nearly every one.  He
+had a glad hand and a smile for the public--because it was the public.
+I watched to see if he had a slightly different smile for the people of
+Back Bay and his own particular social class; sometimes I thought he
+had, and it made me a little soul-sick.
+
+I longed for a home for my baby and a few friends I could love and
+really enjoy.  I was not fitted to be the wife of a public man.  It was
+the poverty and crudeness of my youth that had made me intolerant.  One
+of the big lessons life has taught me is that people can be amiable,
+tolerant, and even friendly, and still be sincere.  The pleasantry of
+social relations among the civilized peoples of the earth is a mere
+garment we wear for our own protection and to cover our feelings.  It is
+the oil of the machinery of life.  I have found that men and women who
+take part in the big work of the earth wear that garment of civility and
+graciousness, and yet have their strong friendships and even their
+bitter enmities.
+
+But I did not understand this when we went back to Europe.  I only knew
+that my husband was amiable to people he did not like, and I questioned
+how deep his affection for me went.  How much of his kindness to me was
+just the easiest way and the manner of a gentleman?
+
+A hard and bare youth had made me supersensitive and suspicious and
+narrow.  I wanted to measure other people by the standards of my own
+primitive years.  Out on the frontier we had judged life in the rough.
+Courage and truth were the essentials.  A man fought his enemies out in
+the open, and made no compromises.  There was nothing easy in life, no
+smooth rhythm.  And I tried to drag forward with me, as I went, the bold
+ethics of the frontier.  I resented good manners because I believed they
+were a cloak of hypocrisy.
+
+A few months after we returned to Europe the shadow of death crossed our
+path, swiftly and terribly.  My little son died.  Other babies came to
+us later, but that first little boy had brought more into my life than
+all the rest of the world could ever give.  He had restored my faith in
+life, my hope, and for a while was all my joy.
+
+People were kind, but I felt that many called merely because it was
+"good form"--"the thing to do." Bitterness was creeping into my heart.
+
+Yet why should it not be "the thing to do" to call on a bereaved mother?
+It is a gesture of humanity.  Tom seemed very far away.  I felt that his
+pride was hurt, perhaps his vanity; for he had boasted of the little
+fellow and loved to show him off.  How little I understood!
+
+I bring myself to tell these intimate things because there is a lesson
+in them for other women--because I resent that any free-born American
+citizen should be handicapped by lacking so small and easily acquired a
+possession as poise, poise that comes with knowledge of the simple rules
+of the social game.  It is my hope that this honest confession of my own
+feelings, due directly to lack of training, may help other women, and
+particularly other mothers whose children are now in the plastic years.
+
+It was my utter lack of appreciation of manners and customs in my
+husband's class that estranged me from Tom.  I was resentful and
+antagonistic merely because I was different.
+
+
+My husband was suffering even as I was suffering; but no one realized
+it, least of all myself.  Every one was especially kind to me, because I
+was a woman.  People are rarely attentive and tender with men when loss
+comes.  Men are supposed to be strong and self-controlled; their hearts
+are rated as a little less deep and tender than the hearts of women; yet
+when men are truly hurt they need love and care even as little children.
+
+A month after the baby's death, Tom and I were walking along the
+Embankment in London one Saturday afternoon, when we met a small girl
+carrying a little child.  The baby was too tired to walk any farther; it
+was dirty, and was crying bitterly.  Tom stopped, spoke to the girl, and
+offered to carry the baby, who soon quieted down on Tom's shoulder.  At
+the end of that walk Tom's light summer suit was ruined.  I expected him
+to turn with some trivial, jesting remark, but he said nothing.  I
+looked at him and saw that his face was set and hard and his eyes wet.
+Without looking at me, he said: "Don't speak to me now."
+
+That moment of silence revealed to me my husband's character better than
+months of talking.
+
+The next day my husband came to me and said:  "Mary, I have asked for a
+leave of absence.  We are going back to the United States.  We are going
+out West to have a visit with your family."
+
+Two years before I had believed that Tom would not fit into my
+Northwest.  But in twenty-four hours Tom and my father were old pals.
+He was as much at home with mother and the children as I, and all the
+neighbors liked him.  He was interested in everything on the ranch, and
+even in the small-town life of the village.  He interested father in
+putting modern equipment on the ranch.  He went hunting with the men,
+played games with the children, visited the little district schoolhouse,
+and found joy in buying gifts for the youngsters.  When mother made a
+big platter full of taffy, he pulled as enthusiastically as a boy.  As I
+stood at the corral, one day, and watched Tom with my youngest brother,
+I remembered him at the court of St. James, and I began to understand.
+
+Tom was natural.  It was just a part of him to be kindly and gracious to
+everybody.  I had never seen him angry with men of his own type, but I
+saw him furious enough to commit murder when a man on the ranch tied up
+a dog and beat her for running away.  In after years I saw Tom angry
+with men of his own class; I saw him waging long, bitter fights against
+public men who had betrayed public trust.  Something barbaric in me was
+satisfied that my kind, gently bred man was one with the men of my own
+tribe, who fought man and beast and the elements to take civilization
+farther west.
+
+Almost a generation slipped by between that visit to the West and the
+next scene in my life of which I shall write.  Many things of personal
+and of national importance happened meantime, but they have nothing to
+do with this message to women.  I was in France when the World War
+began.  I had been in Vienna again, and in England at regular intervals.
+I had learned to accept life as I found it, and to get much joy out of
+living.  Sometimes I chafed a little under the demands of social life
+and needless formalities, but I accepted them as inevitable.
+
+
+Then the world was torn in two.  The earth dripped in blood and sorrow.
+Life became more difficult than on the frontier, and more elemental.  I
+was present, in the first year of the war, in a house where the King and
+Queen of the Belgians were guests, where great generals and great
+statesmen had gathered on great and earnest and desperate business.  I
+was only an onlooker, and I noticed what every one else was too absorbed
+to see.  As the evening progressed, I realized that pomp and ceremony
+had died with the youth of France.  King, generals, statesmen met as
+human men pitting their wits against one another, desperately struggling
+to find a way out of the hell into which they were falling.
+
+Twice the king rose to his feet, and no one else stood.  They were all
+too deep in the terrible question of war.
+
+When the meeting was over and the guests of the house ready to retire,
+the little queen said very quietly:  "Madam, may not my husband and I
+occupy this room together?  It is very kind of you to arrange two suites
+for us, but I am sure there are many guests here to-night--and, anyway,
+I prefer to be near him."
+
+The war had done that.  Who would expect a queen to think of the
+problems of housing guests, even a great queen?  And the war had made
+the king not the king, but her man, very near and very dear.
+
+Many other conventions I saw die by the way as the war progressed.  Then
+America came in.
+
+There is a temptation to talk about America in the war, but, after all,
+that has no bearing on my story.  Soon after the United States entered,
+American men and women began to arrive in Europe in great numbers.
+I met them everywhere; sight-seeing, in offices, at universities, at
+embassies and consulates.  I met them and loved them and suffered for
+them.
+
+I was proud of something they brought to France that France needed, and
+I have no doubt that many of them took back to America something from
+France that we need.
+
+For pure mental quality and courage, no people on earth could match what
+the American girls took to France.  It was the finest stuff in the
+world.  They knew how to meet hardship without grumbling.  They knew how
+to run a kitchen and see that hungry men were fed.  They knew how to
+nurse, to run telephones, automobiles--anything that needed to be done.
+Some failed and fell by the wayside, but they were the smallest possible
+percentage.
+
+Those American girls knew how to do everything--almost everything.
+
+Two wonderful girls, one who ran a telephone for the army and another in
+the "Y," both from the Middle West, were at headquarters the day the
+King and Queen of the Belgians arrived.  With others they were sent to
+serve tea, and they served it.  The "Y" girl, taking a young captain
+whose presence made her eyes glisten to her Majesty, said:
+
+"Captain Blank, meet the queen."
+
+And the queen, holding out her hand, and never batting an eye to show
+that all the conventions had been thrown to the winds, said:
+
+"Captain, I am very happy to meet you."
+
+They served tea--served it to the king, the queen, the general of the
+American army, and other important people.  There was cake besides tea,
+and it was not easy to drink tea and eat cake standing.  The telephone
+girl insisted that General Pershing must sit down.  The king was
+standing, and of course, General Pershing continued to do the same.
+
+"Will you sit down?" said another girl to the king.  "There are plenty
+of chairs."
+
+That girl had done her job in France--a job of which many a man might
+have been proud--and on her left breast she wore a military medal for
+valor.  The king touched the medal, smiled at her, and said he was glad
+there were plenty of chairs, for he knew places where there were not.
+
+But General Pershing and his cake still bothered the little Illinois
+girl, who went back at him again and asked him to sit down and enjoy his
+cake.  The king indicated to the general to be seated.
+
+No one but General Pershing would have known what to do between the rule
+to stand when a king stands and the rule to obey the order of the king.
+He gracefully placed his plate on the side of a table, half seated
+himself on it, which was a compromise, and went on enjoying himself.
+The king sat down.
+
+If any one had told that girl the sacredness of the convention she had
+ignored, she would have suffered as keenly as I had suffered in my
+youth.  It was such a simple thing to learn; yet who in the middle of a
+war would think of stopping to run a class in etiquette?  The point is
+that any girl capable of crossing half the world to do a big job and a
+hard one in a foreign land should have been given the opportunity to
+learn the rules of social intercourse.
+
+
+I saw some American girls and men on official occasions at private
+houses and at official functions.  They were clever, attractive,
+fascinating; but when they came to the end of their visit, they rose to
+go, and then stood talking, talking, talking.  They did not know exactly
+how to get away.  They did not want to be abrupt nor appear to be glad
+to leave.
+
+It would have been so simple for some one to say to them:  "One of the
+first rules in social life is to get up and go when you are at the end
+of your visit."
+
+I was in Paris when Marshal Joffre gave the American Ambassador, Mr.
+Sharp, the gold oak leaves as a token of France's veneration for
+America.  There were young girls around us who did not hesitate to
+comment on everybody there.  One little New Jersey girl insisted rather
+audibly that Clemenceau looked like the old watchman on their block;
+and a boy, a young officer, complained that General Foch "had not won
+as many decorations as General Bliss and General Pershing."  Some
+youngsters asked high officers for souvenirs.  Many French people
+perhaps did worse, but it hurt me to see even a few of our own splendid
+young people guilty of such crudities, because our American youth is so
+fine at heart.
+
+When the great artist Rodin died, I went to the public ceremony held in
+his memory.  Suddenly I realized that America and France each had
+something left that war had not destroyed.  A young American art
+student, who had given up his career for his uniform, and was invalided
+back in Paris minus an arm, stood very near me.  As he turned to Colonel
+House I heard him say:
+
+"Rodin's going is another battle lost."
+
+It was typical of the American quality of which we have cause to
+boast--the fineness of heart that is in our young people.
+
+
+The day of the armistice in France, those of us who are older stood
+looking on and realizing that all class distinctions, all race, age, and
+pursuits, had been wiped off the map.  People were just people.  There
+was a complete abandon.  I am not a young woman, but I was caught up by
+the fury of the crowd, and swept along singing, laughing, weeping.
+Young soldiers passing would reach out to touch my hand, sometimes to
+kiss me.
+
+That night I believed that the war had broken down many of our barriers;
+that all foolish customs had died; that the terrific price paid in human
+blood and human suffering had at least left a world honest with itself,
+simple and ready for good comradeship; that men were measured by
+manliness and women by ideals.  It was a part of the armistice day
+fervor, but I believed it.
+
+And then I came home and went to Newport.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+Just before I came home to America in the Spring of 1919, I went to
+Essex for a week-end  in one of those splendid old estates which are the
+pride of England.
+
+It was not my first visit, but I was awed anew by the immensity of the
+place, its culture and wealth which seemed to have existed always, its
+aged power and pride.  Whole lives had been woven into its window
+curtains and priceless rugs; centuries of art lived in the great
+tapestries; successive generations of great artists had painted the
+ancestors of the present owner.
+
+All three sons of that house went into the war.  One never returned from
+Egypt, another is buried in Flanders.  Only the youngest returned.
+
+At first glance the smooth life seemed unchanged in the proud old house.
+But before sundown of my first day there, I knew that life had put its
+acid test to the shield and proved it pure gold.
+
+War taxes had fallen heavily on the estate and it was to be leased to an
+American.  Until then, the castle was a home to less fortunate buddies
+of the owner's sons.
+
+But these were not the tests I mean, neither these nor the courage and
+the poise of that family in the face of their terrible loss, nor their
+effort to make every one happy and comfortable.
+
+It was an incident at tea time that opened my eyes.  The youngest son,
+now the only son, came in from a cross-country tramp and brought with
+him a pleasant faced young woman whom he introduced as "one of my pals
+in the war."
+
+
+That was enough.  Lady R. greeted her as one of the royal blood.  The
+girl was the daughter of a Manchester plumber.  She had done her bit,
+and it had been a hard bit, in the war, and now she was stenographer in
+a near-by village.  Later in the afternoon the story came out.  She had
+been clerk in the Q. M. corps and after her brother's death she asked
+for service near the front, something hard.  She got it.  The mules in
+the supply and ammunition trains must be fed and it was her job to get
+hay to a certain division.  The girl had ten motor trucks to handle and
+twenty men, three of them noncommissioned officers.
+
+After four days, during which trucks had disappeared and mules gone
+unfed, she asked the colonel for the rank of first sergeant, with only
+enlisted men under her.
+
+Her first official orders were: All trucks must stay together.  If one
+breaks down, the others will stop and help.
+
+The second day of her new command, she met our young host, who needed a
+truck to move supplies and tried to commandeer one of hers.  When she
+refused, he ordered her.  He was a captain.
+
+"I am under orders to get those ten loads of hay to the mules," was her
+reply.
+
+"What will you do if I just take one of them?" asked the captain.
+
+"You won't," said the girl confidently.
+
+"I must get a truck," he insisted.  "What can you do about it if I take
+one of yours?"
+
+"England needs men," she answered.  "But if you made it necessary I'd
+have to shoot you.  If the mules are n't fed, you and other men can't
+fight.  If you were fit to be a captain, you'd know that."
+
+
+The young captain told the story himself and his family enjoyed it,
+evidently admiring the Manchester lassie, who sat there as red as a
+poppy.  They did not bend to the plumber's daughter, nor seem to try to
+lift her to the altars of their ancient hall.
+
+Every one met on new ground, a ground where human beings had faced death
+together.  It was sign of a new fellowship, too deep and fine for even a
+fish knife to sever.  There was no consciousness of ancient class.
+There was only to-day and to-morrow.
+
+It was the America I love--that spirit.  The best America--valuing a
+human being for personal worth.  Then I sailed for home.  I went to
+Newport, to the Atlantic coast resorts.  They were all the same.
+
+The world had changed but not my own country.
+
+I saw more show of wealth, more extravagance, more carelessness, more
+reckless morals than ever before, and--horrible to contemplate--
+springing up in the new world, the narrow social standards which war had
+torn from the old.
+
+Social lines tightened.  Men who had been overwhelmingly welcome while
+they wore shoulder straps were now rated according to bank accounts or
+"family." The "doughboy shavetail", a hero before the armistice, or the
+aviator who held the stage until November eleventh, once he put on his
+serge suit and went back to selling insurance or keeping books, became a
+nodding acquaintance, sometimes not even that.
+
+I was heartsick.  I thought often of those splendid men I had met in
+France and of the girls who poured tea for the King of the Belgians.
+I wondered if any one back home was "just nodding" to them.
+
+Everywhere was the blatant show of new wealth.
+
+New money always glitters.  I saw it in cars with aluminum hoods and
+gold fittings, diamonds big as birds' eggs, ermine coats in the
+daytime--jeweled heels at night.
+
+Bad breeding plus new money shouted from every street corner.  At
+private dinners, I ate foods that I knew were served merely because they
+were expensive, glutton feasts with twice as much as any one could eat
+with comfort.
+
+One day I went to market--the kind of a market to which my mother would
+have gone--and I saw women whose husbands labored hard, scorning to buy
+any but porterhouse steaks--merely because porterhouse steak stood for
+prosperity.
+
+In Washington I met a new kind of American, a type that has sprung up
+suddenly like an evil toadstool.  It is a fungous disease that spreads.
+Some hangs from old American stock, some dangles from recent plantings,
+all of it is snobbish and offensive.  It wears foreign clothes and
+affects foreign ways, sometimes even foreign accents.  It chops and
+mumbles its words like English servants who speak their language badly.
+Some of this is acquired at fashionable finishing schools or from
+foreign secretaries and servants.  These new Americans try to appear
+superior and distinctive by scorning all things American.  They want
+English chintzes in their homes, French brocades and Italian silks and
+do not even know that some of these very textiles from America have won
+prizes in Europe since 1912.  An American manufacturer told me he has to
+stamp his cretonne "English style print" to sell it in this country.
+
+
+This new species of American apes royalty.  It goes in for crests.  It
+may have made its money in gum shoes or chewing tobacco, but it hires a
+genealogist to dig up a shield.  Fine, if you are entitled to a crest.
+But fake genealogists will cook up a coat for the price.
+
+There are crests on the motor-cars, crests on the stationery, on the
+silver, the toilet articles--there are sometimes even crests on the
+servants' buttons and on linen and underclothes!
+
+Fake crests are the first step down, and like all lies they lead to
+other lies.  The next step is ancestors.
+
+Selling and painting ancestors is another business which thrives around
+New York, Philadelphia, and Washington.  And the public swallows it.
+They swallow each other's ancestors.  Even old families take these new
+descendants as a matter of course.
+
+One of these new Americans recently gave a large feast in Washington
+with every out-of-season delicacy in profusion.  The only simple thing
+in the house was the mind of the hostess.  That night it was a tangled
+skein.
+
+I saw she was worried.  Her house was full of potentates, the wives of
+two cabinet officers, and Mrs. Coolidge.  She left the room twice after
+the dinner hour had arrived, and it was late when dinner was finally
+announced.
+
+Later in the evening one of the servants whispered to the hostess that
+she was wanted on the telephone--the State Department.
+
+She returned to the drawing-room looking as if she had just heard of a
+death in the family.  The guests began considerately to leave.
+
+Her expensive party was a dismal failure.  As I have known her husband
+for years, I asked if I could be of any use.
+
+"It 's too late, now," he said.  "She had the Princess Bibesco and the
+Princess Lubomirska here and the wife of the Vice President, and she
+didn't know the precedence they took.  She held up dinner half an hour
+trying to get the State Department and now they tell her she guessed
+wrong.  It 's a tragedy to her."
+
+I confess I did not feel very sorry for that woman.  I remembered my
+little Indiana girl who introduced the captain to the Queen of Belgium.
+
+I began to feel as if all America were like the De Morgan jingle:
+
+                   "Great fleas have little fleas
+                    On their backs to bite 'em,
+                    And little fleas have lesser fleas
+                    And so ad infinitum."
+
+Then I took a trip across the continent, stopping off in Indiana to see
+my little Y friends.  It was like a bath for my soul.  Brains count out
+West.  Anybody who tries to show off is snubbed.
+
+You must do something to be anything in the Middle West; just to have
+something doesn't count.  You don't list your ancestors as you must in
+Virginia or the Carolinas, but to feel self-respecting you must do
+something.
+
+I was happy to renew my wartime friendships.  Those who have not shared
+a great work or a greater tragedy will not understand these bonds.
+
+The same young friend who served tea to the king took me to a musicale.
+She wore her war medal.  One of the guests, a lady from Virginia who
+claims four coats of arms, was impressed by the girl's medal and the
+fact that she had entertained the king.
+
+The girl had married since the war, a fine young Irish lawyer, with a
+family name which once belonged to a king but which, since hard times
+hit the old sod, has been a butt for song and jest.
+
+The name did not impress the lady from Virginia.  "You have such an
+interesting face," she said.  "What was your name before your marriage?"
+
+"Oh, it was much less interesting than my husband's," answered my young
+Y friend, and lifting the conversation out of the personal she asked,
+"Have you read Mr. Keynes' 'The Economic Consequences of the Peace?'"
+
+"I had n't read it myself," she confided to me later, "but it was the
+first new book I could think of!"
+
+That is good American manners and what the French call savoir faire.
+
+The Far West still keeps the American inheritance of open hearted
+hospitality and its provincialism.  The West has inherited some of the
+finest virtues of our country, and if it is not bitten by Back Bay,
+Philadelphia, Virginia, or Charleston, it will grow up into its mother's
+finest child.
+
+"No church west of Chicago, no God west of Denver," we used to hear when
+I was a child.  But to-day, the churches are part of the community and
+even men go.  People in the West do not seem to go to church merely out
+of respect for the devil and a conscience complex, but because they like
+to.  Churches and schools are important places in the West.
+
+President Harding has said that he hopes more and more people will learn
+to want to pray in a closet alone with God.  There are many people like
+that in our Middle West.  I say this, because I hope it may help other
+American women who love their country to fight for honesty and purpose
+in our national life, and for tolerance and respect for the simple
+things in our private lives.
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LOG-CABIN LADY, ANONYMOUS ***
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