e
fashionable. There was great ease there, and simplicity; and if there
was not distinction, it was not for want of distinguished people, but
because there seems to be some solvent in New York life that reduces all
men to a common level, that touches everybody with its potent magic and
brings to the surface the deeply underlying nobody. The effect for
some temperaments, for consciousness, for egotism, is admirable; for
curiosity, for hero worship, it is rather baffling. It is the spirit of
the street transferred to the drawing-room; indiscriminating, levelling,
but doubtless finally wholesome, and witnessing the immensity of the
place, if not consenting to the grandeur of reputations or presences.

Beaton now denied that this house represented a salon at all, in the old
sense; and he held that the salon was impossible, even undesirable,
with us, when Miss Vance sighed for it. At any rate, he said that this
turmoil of coming and going, this bubble and babble, this cackling and
hissing of conversation was not the expression of any such civilization
as had created the salon. Here, he owned, were the elements of
intellectual delightfulness, but he said their assemblage in such
quantity alone denied the salon; there was too much of a good thing.
The French word implied a long evening of general talk among the guests,
crowned with a little chicken at supper, ending at cock-crow. Here was
tea, with milk or with lemon-baths of it and claret-cup for the hardier
spirits throughout the evening. It was very nice, very pleasant, but
it was not the little chicken--not the salon. In fact, he affirmed, the
salon descended from above, out of the great world, and included the
aesthetic world in it. But our great world--the rich people, were
stupid, with no wish to be otherwise; they were not even curious about
authors and artists. Beaton fancied himself speaking impartially, and so
he allowed himself to speak bitterly; he said that in no other city in
the world, except Vienna, perhaps, were such people so little a part of
society.

"It isn't altogether the rich people's fault," said Margaret; and she
spoke impartially, too. "I don't believe that the literary men and the
artists would like a salon that descended to them. Madame Geoffrin, you
know, was very plebeian; her husband was a business man of some sort."

"He would have been a howling swell in New York," said Beaton, still
impartially.

Wetmore came up to their corner, with a s