Through the Eye of the Needle: A Romance

  XVII

  Our fashion of offering hospitality on the impulse would be as strangehere as offering it without some special inducement for its acceptance.The inducement is, as often as can be, a celebrity or eccentricity ofsome sort, or some visiting foreigner; and I suppose that I have been agood deal used myself in one quality or the other. But when the thing hasbeen done, fully and guardedly at all points, it does not seem to havebeen done for pleasure, either by the host or the guest. The dinner isgiven in payment of another dinner; or out of ambition by people who arestriving to get forward in society; or by great social figures who giveregularly a certain number of dinners every season. In either case it iseaten from motives at once impersonal and selfish. I do not mean to saythat I have not been at many dinners where I felt nothing perfunctoryeither in host or guest, and where as sweet and gay a spirit ruled as atany of our own simple feasts. Still, I think our main impression ofAmerican hospitality would be that it was thoroughly infused with theplutocratic principle, and that it meant business.

  I am speaking now of the hospitality of society people, who number, afterall, 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 verycomfortable, and on the way to great prosperity, if they are not alreadygreatly prosperous, that if they were suddenly confronted with the bestsociety of the great Eastern cities they would find it almost as strangeas so many Altrurians. A great part of them have no conception ofentertaining except upon an Altrurian scale of simplicity, and they knownothing and care less for the forms that society people value themselvesupon. 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 andindifference; it is long before anxiety concerning the social law rendersthem vulgar.

  Yet from highest to lowest, from first to last, one invariable factcharacterizes them all, and it may be laid down as an axiom that in aplutocracy the man who needs a dinner is the man who is never asked todine. I do not say that he is not given a dinner. He is very often givena dinner, and for the most part he is kept from starving to death; but heis not suffered to sit at meat with his host, if the person who gives hima meal can be called his host. His need of the meal stamps him with ahopeless inferiority, and relegates him morally to the company of theswine 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 himfor any place in good society short of Abraham's bosom; but even if hewere entirely decent, or of an inoffensive shabbiness, it would not bepossible for his benefactors, in any grade of society, to ask him totheir tables. He is sometimes fed in the kitchen; where the people of thehouse 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 whomMrs. Makely invited me specially to meet on Thanksgiving-day. It happenedthen, as it often happens here, that although I was asked to meet her, Isaw very little of her. It was not so bad as it sometimes is, for I havebeen asked to meet people, very informally, and passed the whole eveningwith them, and yet not exchanged a word with them. Mrs. Makely reallygave me a seat next Mrs. Strange at table, and we had some unimportantconversation; but there was a lively little creature vis-a-vis of me, whohad a fancy of addressing me so much of her talk that my acquaintancewith. Mrs. Strange rather languished through the dinner, and she wentaway so soon after the men rejoined the ladies in the drawing-room that Idid not speak to her there. I was rather surprised, then, to receive anote 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. Ihad been, in the mean time, thoroughly coached concerning her by Mrs.Makely, whom I told of my invitation, and who said, quite frankly, thatshe wished Mrs. Strange had asked her, too. "But Eveleth Strange wouldn'tdo that," she explained, "because it would have the effect of paying meback. I'm so glad, on your account, that you're going, for I do want youto 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 vexedthat you really had no chance to talk with her that night you met herhere; 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 Icould tell you just what sort of a person she is, but it would beperfectly hopeless, for you haven't got the documents, and you nevercould get them. I used to be at school with her, and even then she wasn'tlike any of the other girls. She was always so original, and did thingsfrom such a high motive, that afterwards, when we were all settled, Iwas perfectly thunderstruck at her marrying old Bellington Strange, whowas twice her age and had nothing but his money; he was not related tothe 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 beplain Peter B. Strange till he married Eveleth, and she made him drop thePeter and blossom out in the Bellington, so that he could seem to have asocial as well as a financial history. People who dislike her insistedthat they were not in the least surprised at her marrying him; that thehigh-motive business was just her pose; and that she had jumped at thechance of getting him. But I always stuck up for her--and I know that shedid it for the sake of her family, who were all as poor as poor, and weredependent on her after her father went to smash in his business. She wasalways as high-strung and romantic as she could be, but I don't believethat even then she would have taken Mr. Strange if there had been anybodyelse. I don't suppose any one else ever looked at her, for the young menare pretty sharp nowadays, and are not going to marry girls without acent, when there are so many rich girls, just as charming every way; youcan't expect them to. At any rate, whatever her motive was, she had herreward, for Mr. Strange died within a year of their marriage, and she gotall his money. There was no attempt to break the will, for Mr. Strangeseemed to be literally of no family; and she's lived quietly on in thehouse he bought her ever since, except when she's in Europe, and that'sabout two-thirds of the time. She has her mother with her, and I supposethat 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 itis, I don't think it's a bad one; and certainly, if she wanted to getmarried again, there would be no trouble, with her three millions. Iadvise you to go to her dinner, by all means, Mr. Homos. It will besomething worth while, in every way, and perhaps you'll convert her toAltrurianism; she's as hopeful a subject as _I_ know."