I say to myself: "I can never be content until this class
walks along the street in a different manner, until that now absurd
legend has been worn clean off its forehead." Henry Harland was not a
great writer, but he said: _Il faut souffrir pour etre sel._ I ask myself
impatiently: "When is this salt going to begin to suffer?" That is my
attitude towards the class. I frequent it but little. Nevertheless I know
it intimately, nearly all the intimacy being on my side. For I have
watched it during long, agreeable, sardonic months and years in foreign
hotels. In foreign hotels you get the essence of it, if not the cream.
* * * * *
Chief among its characteristics--after its sincere religious worship of
money and financial success--I should put its intense self-consciousness
as a class. The world is a steamer in which it is travelling saloon.
Occasionally it goes to look over from the promenade deck at the steerage.
Its feelings towards the steerage are kindly. But the tone in which it
says "the steerage" cuts the steerage off from it more effectually than
many bulkheads. You perceive also from that tone that it could never be
surprised by anything that the steerage might do. Curious social
phenomenon, the steerage! In the saloon there runs a code, the only
possible code, the final code; and it is observed.
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