while he told how the daughter of
Governor Swan had come to attend a ball at Hampton, and how she had died
in the four-post bed in that old shadowy guest room, and of how, since
then, she had been seen from time to time.

"They's several people say they saw her," he finished. "She comes out
and combs her hair in front of the long mirror."

However, as we drove back to Baltimore that evening, we repeatedly
assured one another that we did not believe in ghosts.

CHAPTER IX

ARE WE STANDARDIZED?

Almost all modern European critics of the United States agree in
complaining that our telephones and sleeping cars are objectionable, and
that we are "standardized" in everything. Their criticism of the
telephone seems to be that the state of perfection to which it has been
brought in this country causes it to be widely used, while their
disapproval of our sleeping cars is invariably based on the assumption
that they have no compartments--which is not the fact, since most of the
great transcontinental railroads do run compartment cars, and much
better ones than the best _wagons lits_, and since, also, all our
sleeping cars have drawing-rooms which are incomparably better than the
most comfortable European compartments.

The charge of standardization will, however, bear a little thought. It
is true that most American cities have a general family
resemblance--that a business street in Atlanta or Memphis looks much
like a business street in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Buffalo, Milwaukee, St.
Paul, Kansas City, or St. Louis--and that much the same thing may be
said of residence streets. Houses and office buildings in one city are
likely to resemble those of corresponding grade in another; the men who
live in the houses and go daily to the offices are also similar; so are
the trolley cars in which they journey to and fro; still more so the
Fords which many of them use; the clothing of one man is like that of
another, and all have similar conventions concerning the date at
which--without regard to temperature--straw hats should be discarded.
Their womenfolk, also, are more or less alike, as are the department
stores in which they shop and the dresses they buy. And the same is true
of their children, the costumes of those children, and the schools they
attend.

Every American city has social groups corresponding to similar groups in
other cities. There is always the small, affluent group, made up of
people who keep butlers a