aens will be
running over the keys, preparing an accompaniment for one of Madame de
Tredern's songs. The Princess Mathilde (that passionate lover of art)
will surely be there, and--but it is needless to particularize.

Cross the Channel, and get yourself asked to one of Irving's choice
suppers after the play. You will find the bar, the stage, and the pulpit
represented there, a "happy family" over which the "Prince" often
presides, smoking cigar after cigar, until the tardy London daylight
appears to break up the entertainment.

For both are centres where the gifted and the travelled meet the great of
the social world, on a footing of perfect equality, and where, if any
prestige is accorded, it is that of brains. When you have seen these
places and a dozen others like them, you will realize what the actor's
wife had in her mind.

Now, let me whisper to you why I think such circles do not exist in this
country. In the first place, we are still too provincial in this big
city of ours. New York always reminds me of a definition I once heard of
California fruit: "Very large, with no particular flavor." We are like a
boy, who has had the misfortune to grow too quickly and look like a man,
but whose mind has not kept pace with his body. What he knows is
undigested and chaotic, while his appearance makes you expect more of him
than he can give--hence disappointment.

Our society is yet in knickerbockers, and has retained all sorts of
littlenesses and prejudices which older civilizations have long since
relegated to the mental lumber room. An equivalent to this point of view
you will find in England or France only in the smaller "cathedral"
cities, and even there the old aristocrats have the courage of their
opinions. Here, where everything is quite frankly on a money basis, and
"positions" are made and lost like a fortune, by a turn of the market,
those qualities which are purely mental, and on which it is hard to put a
practical value, are naturally at a discount. We are quite ready to pay
for the best. Witness our private galleries and the opera, but we say,
like the parvenu in Emile Augier's delightful comedy _Le Gendre de M.
Poirier_, "Patronize art? Of course! But the artists? Never!" And
frankly, it would be too much, would it not, to expect a family only half
a generation away from an iron foundry, or a mine, to be willing to
receive Irving or Bernhardt on terms of perfect equality?

As it would be u