tually serving God; no factitious Ottoman of a Kurz Pasha, laughingly
yet sadly observant of us playing at the forms of European society.
Those devices of the satirist belonged to the sentimentalist mood of the
Thackerayan epoch. But it is astonishing how exactly history repeats
itself in the facts of the ball in 1910 from the ball of 1852. The
motives, the _personnel_, almost the _materiel_, the incidents, are the
same. I should think it would amuse Mr. Pulitzer, imitating nature from
his actual observation, to find how essentially his study is the same
with that of Curtis imitating nature fifty-seven years ago. There is
more of nature in bulk, not in variety, to be imitated now, but as Mr.
Pulitzer studies it in the glass of fashion, her mean, foolish, selfish
face is the same. He would find in the sketches of the Mid-Victorian
satirist all sorts of tender relentings and generous hopes concerning
the 'gay' New York of that time which the Early Edwardian satirist
cannot indulge concerning the gay New York of this time. It seems as if
we had really gone from bad to worse, not qualitatively--we
couldn't--but quantitatively. There is more money, there are more men,
more women, but otherwise our proud world is the proud world of 1853."

"You keep saying the same thing with 'damnable iterance,'" we remarked.
"Don't you suppose that outside of New York there is now a vast society,
as there was then, which enjoys itself sweetly, kindly, harmlessly? Is
there no gentle Chicago or kind St. Louis, no pastoral Pittsburg, no
sequestered Cincinnati, no bucolic Boston, no friendly Philadelphia,
where 'the heart that is humble may look for' disinterested pleasure in
the high-society functions of the day or night? Does New York set the
pace for all these places, and are dinners given there as here, not for
the delight of the guests, but as the dire duty of the hostesses? Do the
inhabitants of those simple sojourns go to the opera to be seen and not
to hear? Do they follow on to balls before the piece is done only to
bear the fardels of ignominy heaped upon them by the german's leaders,
or to see their elders and fatters getting all the beautiful and costly
favors while their own young and gracile loveliness is passed slighted
by because they give no balls where those cruel captains can hope to
shine in the van? It seems to us that in our own far prime--now
well-nigh lost in the mists of antiquity--life was ordered kindlier;
that dinners