e mouth
about it. Even the laboring classes are affected. The rich man wishes
to live without any discomfort whatever, and the poor man wishes to
live without doing any work whatever. That, I think, is at the root of
their most bloody differences of opinion, for the poor man thinks that
the rich man ought to be uncomfortable, and the rich man thinks that
the poor man ought to work. And they will never be in agreement.

Given enough money it becomes easier and easier to run from one
difficulty or discomfort into another. And even the laborer finds it
continually easier to make a living without earning it.

When I was a little boy, Newport and Bar Harbor were a long way from
New York. To Europe was a real voyage; while such places as Palm Beach
and Aiken were never mentioned in polite society, for the simple reason
that polite society had never heard of them. But nowadays it is not
uncommon for a man to have visited all these places (and some of them
more than once) in the course of a year. Europe which was once a
foreign country is now but as a suburb of New York. And I myself, I am
happy to say, have been far oftener in Paris than in Brooklyn.

The modern butterfly thinks little of flying out to Pittsburg or
Cleveland or St. Louis for a dance or a mere wedding. He attends
athletic events thousands of miles apart, and knows his way from the
front door to the bar and card room of every important club between the
Jockey Club in Paris and the Pacific Union in San Francisco, excepting,
of course, those clubs in his own city to which he does not happen to
belong.

My father, because of my little sister's fragility, was one of the
first men I know to make a practice of going South for the winter, and
to Long Island for the spring and autumn. In summer we went to Europe
or Bar Harbor, for with justice he preferred the climate of the latter
to that of Newport or Southampton. We were less and less in our town
house, and indeed so jumped about from place to place, that although my
mother succeeded in making her other houses easy and indeed charming to
live in, I have never known what it was to have a home. And indeed I
cannot at this moment call to mind a single New York family of the
upper class that lives in a home.

My mother is old-fashioned. She would have preferred to live in one
place the year around, to beautify and to ennoble that place; to be
buried from it as she had been married into it, and to leave