Palaces in all
but the name stand where the buffalo was wont to disport himself, and
where the American eagle in human form once flapped his wings and
screamed most viciously in contempt of the effete civilization of the
older world. Sons and daughters of the pioneers who bolted their
dinners on the stroke of twelve find seven too early for elegant
convenience. Among the reddest and palest of hot-house roses, which
deck their tables, glisten glass of Venetian pattern and china from the
bankrupt stock of kings. According to their intellectualities their
talk is of labor and capital, of working-girls' clubs and model
tenement-houses, of Buddha and Zola, of foreign titles, and
transplanted fox-hunting. To-day a hundred thousand dollars is barely
a competency, and a building less than a dozen stories high dwarfs the
highway of trade. The vestibule limited, the ocean grey-hound, the
Atlantic cable, and the voice-bearing telephone have made all nations
kin, and bid fair to amalgamate society. Even the newly created
species condescends to swap her birthright for a coronet.
All this has come to pass while Josephine and I have been plodding
along the route of all flesh, trying not to forget our early
aspirations. We have changed our dinner-hour with the rest of the
world; we have learned to talk more or less unintelligently about the
sweating system and Buddhism; we have bowed our necks to the yoke of
the electric wire.
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