Our fashion of offering hospitality on the impulse would be as strange
here as offering it without some special inducement for its acceptance.
The inducement is, as often as can be, a celebrity or eccentricity of
some sort, or some visiting foreigner; and I suppose that I have been a
good deal used myself in one quality or the other. But when the thing has
been done, fully and guardedly at all points, it does not seem to have
been done for pleasure, either by the host or the guest. The dinner is
given in payment of another dinner; or out of ambition by people who are
striving to get forward in society; or by great social figures who give
regularly a certain number of dinners every season. In either case it is
eaten from motives at once impersonal and selfish. I do not mean to say
that I have not been at many dinners where I felt nothing perfunctory
either in host or guest, and where as sweet and gay a spirit ruled as at
any of our own simple feasts. Still, I think our main impression of
American hospitality would be that it was thoroughly infused with the
plutocratic principle, and that it meant business.
I am speaking now of the hospitality of society people, who number, after
all, but a few thousands out of the many millions of American people.
These millions are so far from being in society, even when they are very
comfortable, and on the way to great prosperity, if they are not already
greatly prosperous, that if they were suddenly confronted with the best
society of the great Eastern cities they would find it almost as strange
as so many Altrurians. A great part of them have no conception of
entertaining except upon an Altrurian scale of simplicity, and they know
nothing and care less for the forms that society people value themselves
upon. When they begin, in the ascent of the social scale, to adopt forms,
it is still to wear them lightly and with an individual freedom and
indifference; it is long before anxiety concerning the social law renders
them vulgar.
Yet from highest to lowest, from first to last, one invariable fact
characterizes them all, and it may be laid down as an axiom that in a
plutocracy the man who needs a dinner is the man who is never asked to
dine. I do not say that he is not given a dinner. He is very often given
a dinner, and for the most part he is kept from starving to death; but he
is not suffered to sit at meat with his host, if the person who gives him
a meal can be called his host. His need of the meal stamps him with a
hopeless inferiority, and relegates him morally to the company of the
swine at their husks, and of Lazarus, whose sores the dogs licked.
Usually, of course, he is not physically of such a presence as to fit him
for any place in good society short of Abraham's bosom; but even if he
were entirely decent, or of an inoffensive shabbiness, it would not be
possible for his benefactors, in any grade of society, to ask him to
their tables. He is sometimes fed in the kitchen; where the people of the
house feed in the kitchen themselves, he is fed at the back door.
We were talking of this the other night at the house of that lady whom
Mrs. Makely invited me specially to meet on Thanksgiving-day. It happened
then, as it often happens here, that although I was asked to meet her, I
saw very little of her. It was not so bad as it sometimes is, for I have
been asked to meet people, very informally, and passed the whole evening
with them, and yet not exchanged a word with them. Mrs. Makely really
gave me a seat next Mrs. Strange at table, and we had some unimportant
conversation; but there was a lively little creature vis-à-vis of me, who
had a fancy of addressing me so much of her talk that my acquaintance
with. Mrs. Strange rather languished through the dinner, and she went
away so soon after the men rejoined the ladies in the drawing-room that I
did not speak to her there. I was rather surprised, then, to receive a
note from her a few days later, asking me to dinner; and I finally went,
I am ashamed to own, more from curiosity than from any other motive. I
had been, in the mean time, thoroughly coached concerning her by Mrs.
Makely, whom I told of my invitation, and who said, quite frankly, that
she wished Mrs. Strange had asked her, too. “But Eveleth Strange wouldn't
do that,” she explained, “because it would have the effect of paying me
back. I'm so glad, on your account, that you're going, for I do want you
to know at least one American woman that you can unreservedly approve of;
I know you don't _begin_ to approve of _me;_ and I was so vexed
that you really had no chance to talk with her that night you met her
here; it seemed to me as if she ran away early just to provoke me; and,
to tell you the truth, I thought she had taken a dislike to you. I wish I
could tell you just what sort of a person she is, but it would be
perfectly hopeless, for you haven't got the documents, and you never
could get them. I used to be at school with her, and even then she wasn't
like any of the other girls. She was always so original, and did things
from such a high motive, that afterwards, when we were all settled, I
was perfectly thunderstruck at her marrying old Bellington Strange, who
was twice her age and had nothing but his money; he was not related to
the New York Bellingtons at all, and nobody knows how he got the name;
nobody ever heard of the Stranges. In fact, people say that he used to be
plain Peter B. Strange till he married Eveleth, and she made him drop the
Peter and blossom out in the Bellington, so that he could seem to have a
social as well as a financial history. People who dislike her insisted
that they were not in the least surprised at her marrying him; that the
high-motive business was just her pose; and that she had jumped at the
chance of getting him. But I always stuck up for her--and I know that she
did it for the sake of her family, who were all as poor as poor, and were
dependent on her after her father went to smash in his business. She was
always as high-strung and romantic as she could be, but I don't believe
that even then she would have taken Mr. Strange if there had been anybody
else. I don't suppose any one else ever looked at her, for the young men
are pretty sharp nowadays, and are not going to marry girls without a
cent, when there are so many rich girls, just as charming every way; you
can't expect them to. At any rate, whatever her motive was, she had her
reward, for Mr. Strange died within a year of their marriage, and she got
all his money. There was no attempt to break the will, for Mr. Strange
seemed to be literally of no family; and she's lived quietly on in the
house he bought her ever since, except when she's in Europe, and that's
about two-thirds of the time. She has her mother with her, and I suppose
that her sisters and her cousins and her aunts come in for outdoor aid.
She's always helping somebody. They say that's her pose, now; but, if it
is, I don't think it's a bad one; and certainly, if she wanted to get
married again, there would be no trouble, with her three millions. I
advise you to go to her dinner, by all means, Mr. Homos. It will be
something worth while, in every way, and perhaps you'll convert her to
Altrurianism; she's as hopeful a subject as _I_ know.”