Autobiography of the Log-Cabin Lady

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THE LOG-CABIN LADY

An Anonymous Autobiography




PREFACE

The story of The Log-Cabin Lady is one of the annals of America.  It is
a moving record of the conquest of self-consciousness and fear through
mastery of manners and customs.  It has been written by one who has not
sacrificed the strength and honesty of her pioneer girlhood, but who
added to these qualities that graciousness and charm which have given
her distinction on two continents.

I have been asked to tell how the story of The Log-Cabin Lady came to be
written.  At a luncheon given at the Colony Club in 1920, I was invited
to talk about Madame Curie.  There were, at that table, a group of
important women.

When I had finished the story of the great scientist, whose service to
humanity was halted by lack of laboratory equipment, and of the very
radium which she had herself discovered, one guest asked: “Why do you
spend your life with a woman’s magazine when you could do big work like
serving Madame Curie?” “I believe,” I replied, “that a woman’s magazine
is one of the biggest services that can be rendered in this country.”

My challenge was met with scorn by one of the women upon whose education
and accomplishments a fortune had been spent.  “It is stupid,” she said,
“to print articles about bringing up children and furnishing houses,
setting tables and feeding families--or whether it is good form for the
host to suggest another service at the dinner table.”

“There are twenty million homes in America,” I answered.  “Only eight
per cent of these have servants in them.  In the other ninety-two per
cent the women do their own housework; bring up their own children, and
take an active part in the life and growth of America.  They are the
people who help make this country the great nation that it is.”

After luncheon one of the guests, a woman of great social prominence,
distinguished both in her own country and abroad, asked me to drive
downtown with her.  When we entered her car she said, with much
feeling--“You must go on with the thing you are doing.”

Believing she referred to the Curie campaign, I replied that I had
committed myself to the work and could not abandon it.  “I was not
referring to the Curie campaign,” she replied, “but to the Delineator.
You are right; it is of vital importance to serve the great masses of
people.  I know.  It will probably surprise you to learn that when I was
fourteen years old I had never seen a table napkin.  My family were
pioneers in the Northwest and were struggling for mere existence.  There
was no time for the niceties of life.  And yet, people like my family
and myself are worth serving and saving.  I have known what it means to
lie awake all night, suffering with shame because of some stupid social
blunder which had made me appear ridiculous before my husband’s family
or his friends.”

This was a most amazing statement from a woman known socially on two
continents, and famed for her savoir faire.  There were tears in her
eyes when she made her confession.  She was stirred by a very real and
deep emotion.  It had been years, she said, since the old recollections
had come back to her, but she had been moved by my plea for service to
home women and to the great mass of ordinary American people.

She told me that while living abroad she had often met American
girls--intelligent women, well bred, the finest stuff in the world--who
suffered under a disadvantage, because they lacked a little training in
the social amenities.

“It has been a satisfaction and a compensation to me,” she added, “to be
able sometimes to serve these fellow country-women of mine.”

And right there was born the idea which culminated in the writing of
this little book.  I suggested that a million women could be helped by
the publishing of her own story.

The thought was abhorrent to her.  Her experience was something she had
never voiced in words.  It would be too intimate a discussion of herself
and her family.  She was sure her relatives would bitterly oppose such a
confession.

It took nearly a year to persuade this remarkable woman to put down on
paper, from her recollections and from her old letters home, this simple
story of a fine American life.  She consented finally to write fragments
of her life, anonymously.  We were pledged not to reveal her identity.
A few changes in geography and time were made in her manuscript, but
otherwise the story is true to life, laden with adventure, spirit and
the American philosophy.  She has refused to accept any remuneration for
the magazine publication or for royalties on the book rights.  The money
accruing from her labor is being set aside in The Central Union Trust
Company of New York City as a trust fund to be used in some charitable
work.  She has given her book to the public solely because she believes
that it contains a helpful message for other women, It is the gracious
gift of a woman who has a deep and passionate love for her country, and
a tender responsiveness to the needs of her own sex.

                                                  MARIE M. MELONEY.

September 1, 1922.




THE LOG-CABIN LADY




I.

I was born in a log cabin.  I came to my pioneer mother in one of
Wisconsin’s bitterest winters.

Twenty-one years later I was sailing for England, the wife of a diplomat
who was one of Boston’s wealthy and aristocratic sons.

The road between--well, let it speak for itself.  Merely to set this
story on paper opens old wounds, deep, but mercifully healed these many
years.  Yet, if other women may find here comfort and illumination and a
certain philosophy, I am glad, and I shall feel repaid.

The first thing I remember is being grateful for windows.  I was three
years old.  My mother had set me to play on a mattress carefully placed
in the one ray of sunlight streaming through the one glass window of our
log cabin.  Baby as I was, I had ached in the agonizing cold of a
pioneer winter.  Lying there, warmed by that blessed sunshine, I was
suddenly aware of wonder and joy and gratitude.  It was gratitude for
glass, which could keep out the biting cold and let in the warm sun.

To this day windows give me pleasure.  My father was a school-teacher
from New England, where his family had taught the three R’s and the
American Constitution since the days of Ben Franklin’s study club.  My
mother was the daughter of a hardworking Scotch immigrant.  Father’s
family set store on ancestry.  Mother’s side was more practical.


The year before my birth these two young people started West in a
prairie schooner to stake a homestead claim.  Father’s sea-man’s chest
held a dictionary, Bancroft’s History of the United States, several
books of mathematics, Plutarch’s Lives, a history of Massachusetts,
a leather-bound file of Civil War records, Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair”,
Shakespeare in two volumes, and the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” My mother
took a Bible.

I can still quote pages from every one of those books.  Until I was
fourteen I saw no others, except a primer, homemade, to teach me my
letters.  Because “Vanity Fair” contained simpler words than the others,
it was given me first; so at the age of seven I was spelling out pages
of the immortal Becky.

My mother did not approve, but father laughed and protested that the
child might as well begin with good things.

After mother’s eighth and last baby, she lay ill for a year.  The care
of the children fell principally on my young shoulders.  One day I found
her crying.

“Mary,” she said, with a tenderness that was rare, “if I die, you must
take care of all your brothers and sisters.  You will be the only woman
within eighteen miles.”

I was ten years old.

That night and many other nights I lay awake, trembling at the
possibility of being left the only woman within eighteen miles.

But mother did not die.  I must have been a sturdy child; for, with the
little help father and his homestead partner could spare, I kept that
home going until she was strong again.

Every fall the shoemaker made his rounds through the country, reaching
our place last, for beyond us lay only virgin forest and wild beasts.
His visit thrilled us more than the arrival of any king to-day.  We had
been cut off from the world for months.  The shoemaker brought news from
neighbors eighteen, forty, sixty, even a hundred and fifty miles away.
Usually he brought a few newspapers too, treasured afterward for months.
He remained, a royal guest, for many days, until all the family was
shod.

Up to my tenth birthday we could not afford the newspaper subscription.
But after that times were a little better, and the Boston Transcript
began to come at irregular intervals.  It formed our only tie with
civilization, except for the occasional purely personal letter from
“back home.”


When I was fourteen three tremendous events had marked my life: sunlight
through a window-pane; the logrolling on the river when father added two
rooms to our cabin; and the night I thought mother would die and leave
me the only woman in eighteen miles.

But the fourth event was the most tremendous.  One night father hurried
in without even waiting to unload or water his team.  He seemed excited,
and handed my mother a letter.  Our Great-Aunt Martha had willed father
her household goods and personal belongings and a modest sum that to us
was a fortune.  Some one back East “awaited his instructions.”  Followed
many discussions, but in the end my mother gained her way.  Great-Aunt
Martha’s house goods were sold at auction.  Father, however, insisted
that her “personal belongings” be shipped to Wisconsin.


After a long, long wait, one day father and I rose at daybreak and rode
thirty-six miles in a springless wagon, over ranchmen’s roads (“the
giant’s vertebrae,” Jim Hill’s men called it) to the nearest express
station, returning with a trunk and two packing cases.  It was a solemn
moment when the first box was opened.  Then mother gave a cry of
delight.  Sheets and bedspreads edged with lace!  Real linen pillowcases
with crocheted edgings.  Soft woolen blankets and bright handmade
quilts.  Two heavy, lustrous table-cloths and two dozen napkins, one
white set hemmed, and one red-and-white, bordered with a soft fringe.

What the world calls wealth has come to me in after years.  Nothing ever
equaled in my eyes the priceless value of Great-Aunt Martha’s “personal
belongings.”

I was in a seventh heaven of delight.  My father picked up the books
and began to read, paying no attention to our ecstasies over dresses and
ribbons, the boxful of laces, or the little shell-covered case holding a
few ornaments in gold and silver and jet.

We women did not stop until we had explored every corner of that trunk
and the two packing boxes.  Then I picked up a napkin.

“What are these for?” I asked curiously.

My father slammed his book shut.  I had never seen such a look on his
face.

“How old are you, Mary?” he demanded suddenly.

I told him that I was going on fifteen.

“And you never saw a table napkin?”

His tone was bitter and accusing.  I did n’t understand--how could I?
Father began to talk, his words growing more and more bitter.  Mother
defended herself hotly.  To-day I know that justice was on her side.
But in that first adolescent self-consciousness my sympathies were all
with father.  Mother had neglected us--she had not taught us to use
table napkins!  Becky Sharp used them.  People in history used them.
I felt sure that Great-Aunt Martha would have been horrified, even in
heaven, to learn I had never even seen a table napkin.

Our parents’ quarrel dimmed the ecstasy of the “personal belongings.”
 From that time we used napkins and a table-cloth on Sundays--that is,
when any one remembered it was Sunday.

Great-Aunt Martha’s napkins opened up a new world for me, and they
strengthened father’s determination to give his children an education.
The September before I reached seventeen, we persuaded mother to let me
go to Madison and study for a half year.

So great was my eagerness to learn from books, that I had given no
thought to people.  Madison, my first town, showed me that my clothes
were homemade and tacky.  Other girls wore store shoes and what seemed
to me beautifully made dresses.  I was a backwoods gawk.  I hated myself
and our home.

With many cautions, father had intrusted eighty dollars to me for the
half year’s expenses.  I took the money and bought my first pair of
buttoned shoes and a store dress with nine gores and stylish mutton-leg
sleeves! It was poor stuff, not warm enough for winter, and, together
with a new coat and hat, made a large hole in my funds.

I found work in a kindly family, where, in return for taking care of an
old lady, I received room and board and two dollars a week.  Four hours
of my day were left for school.

The following February brought me an appointment as teacher in a
district school, at eighteen dollars a month and “turnabout” boarding in
farmers’ families.

The next two years were spent teaching and attending school in Madison.
When I was twenty, a gift from father added to my savings and made
possible the realization of one of my dreams.  I went East for a special
summer course.

No tubes shuttled under the Hudson in those days.  From the ferry-boat
I was suddenly dazzled with the vision of a towering gold dome rising
above the four and five-story structures.  The New York World building
was then the tallest in the world.  To me it was also the most
stupendous.

Impulsively I turned to a man leaning on the ferry-boat railing beside
me.  “Is n’t that the most wonderful thing in the world?” I gasped.

“Not quite,” he answered, and looked at me.  His look made me
uncomfortable.  I could have spoken to any stranger in Madison without
embarrassment.  It took me about twenty years to understand why a plain,
middle-aged woman may chat with a strange man anywhere on earth, while
the same conversation cheapens a good-looking young girl.

That summer I met my future husband.  He was doing research work at
Columbia, and we ran across each other constantly in the library.  I
fairly lived there, for I found myself, for the first time, among a
wealth of books, and I read everything--autobiographies, histories, and
novels good and bad.

Tom’s family and most of his friends were out of town for July and
August.  I had never met any one like him, and he had never dreamed of
any one like me.  We were friends in a week and sweethearts in a month.

Instead of joining his family, Tom stayed in New York and showed me the
town.  He took me to my first plays.  Even now I know that “If I Were
King” and “The Idol’s Eye”, with Frank Daniels, were good.

One day we went driving in an open carriage--his.  It was upholstered in
soft fawn color, the coachman wore fawn-colored livery, and the horses
were beautiful.  I was very happy.  When we reached my boarding house
again, I jumped out.  I was used to hopping from spring wagons.

“Please don’t do that again, Mary,” reproved Tom, very gently.  “You
might hurt yourself.”  That amused me, until a look from the coachman
suddenly conveyed to me that I had made a _faux pas_.  Not long after I
hurried off a street car ahead of Tom.  This time he said nothing, but I
have not forgotten the look on his face.

Over our marvelous meals in marvelous restaurants Tom delighted to get
me started about home.  Great-Aunt Martha’s “personal belongings” amused
him hugely.  He never tired of the visiting shoemaker, nor of the
carpenter who declared indignantly that if we wore decent clothes we
wouldn’t need our bench seats planed smooth.  But some things I never
told--about the table napkins, for instance.


We were married in September.  Our honeymoon we spent fishing and
“roughing it” in the Canadian wilds.  I felt at home and blissful.
I could cook and fish and make a bed in the open as well as any man.
It was heaven; but it left me entirely unprepared for the world I was
about to enter.

Not once did Tom say: “Mary, we do this [or that] in our family.”  He
was too happy, and I suppose he never thought of it.  As for me, I
wasted no worry on his family.  They would be kind and sympathetic and
simple, like Tom.  They would love me and I would love them.

The day after we returned from Canada to New York I spent looking over
Tom’s “personal belongings”--as great a revelation as Aunt
Martha’s.  His richly bound books, his beautiful furniture, his
pictures--everything was perfect.  That night Tom made an announcement:
“The family gets home to-night, and they will come to call to-morrow.”

“Why don’t we go to the station to meet them?” I suggested.

To-day I appreciate better than I could then the gentle tact with which
Tom told me his family was strong on “good form”, and that the husband’s
family calls on the bride first.  My husband’s family came, and I
realized that I was a mere baby in a new world--a complicated and not
very friendly world, at that.  Though they never put it into words, they
made me understand, in their cruel, polite way, that Tom was the hope of
the family, and his sudden marriage to a stranger had been a great
shock, if not more.

The beautiful ease of my husband’s women-folk filled me with admiration
and despair.  I felt guilty of something.  I was queer.  Their voices,
the intonation, even the tilt of their chins, seemed to stamp these new
“in-laws” as aristocrats of another race.  Yet the same old New England
stock that sired their ancestors produced my father’s fathers.

Theirs had stayed in Boston, and had had time to teach their children
grace and refinement and subtleties.  Mine fought for their existence in
a new country.  And when men and women fight for existence life becomes
very simple.


I felt only my own misery that day.  Now I realize that the meeting
between Tom’s mother and his wife was a mutual misery.  I was crude.  No
doubt, to her, I seemed even common.  With every one except Tom I seemed
awkward and stupid.  Poor mother-in-law!

When she rose to go, I saw her to her carriage.  She was extremely
insistent that I should not.  But this was Tom’s mother, and I was
determined to leave no friendly act undone.  At home it would have been
an offense not to see the company to their wagon.  Even in Madison we
would have escorted a caller to his carriage.

Again it was the coachman who with one chill look warned me that I had
sinned.

Before Tom came home that afternoon he called on his mother, so no
explanations from me were necessary.  He knew it all, and doubtless much
more than had escaped me.  Like the princely gentleman he always was,
the poor boy tried to soften that after-noon’s blows by saying social
customs were stupid and artificial and I knew all the important things
in life.  The other few little things and habits of his world he could
easily tell me.

Few--and little! There were thousands, and they loomed bigger each day.
Moreover, Tom did not tell me.  Either, manlike, he forgot, or he was
afraid of hurting my feelings.

One of the few things Tom did tell me I was forever forgetting.  Napkins
belonged to Sundays at home, and they were not washed often.  It was a
long-standing habit, to save back-breaking work for mother, to fold my
napkin neatly after meals.  Unlearning that and acquiring the custom of
mussing up one’s napkin and leaving it carelessly on the table was the
meanest work of my life.

Interesting guests came to Tom’s house, and I would grow absorbed in
their talk.  Not until we were leaving the table would I realize that my
napkin lay neatly folded and squared in the midst of casually rumpled
heaps.

One night, years later, I sat between Jim Hill and Senator Bailey of
Texas at a dinner.  Both men folded their napkins.  I loved them for it.


During that first year Tom made up a little theater party for a
classmate who had just married a Philadelphia girl.  With memories of
Ben Franklin, William Penn, Liberty Bell, and all the grand old
characters of the City of brotherly Love, I looked forward eagerly to
making a new friend.

The Philadelphian was even more languid than Tom’s mother.  She chopped
her words and there were no r’s in her English.  I tried to break the
ice by talking of the traditions of her city.  She was bored.  She knew
only Philadelphia’s social register.  Just to play tit for tat, twice
during the evening I quoted from “Julius Caesar”--and scored!

We had just settled down in old Martin’s Restaurant for after-theater
supper when two tall gentlemen entered the room.

“There’s Tom Platt and Chauncey Depew,” remarked Tom’s friend casually.

United States senators are important people in Wisconsin--at least, they
were when I was young.  If a senator visited our community, everybody
turned out.  I knew much of both these men, and Tom had often spoken
warmly of Depew.  As they approached our table, Tom and his friend both
stood up.  Thrilled, I rose hastily.  My eyes were too busy to see Tom’s
face, and I did not realize until afterward that the only other woman
had remained coolly seated.

On our way home, Tom told me, in his gentle way, never to rise from a
dining table to acknowledge an introduction even to a woman--or a
senator.  That night a tormenting devil with the face of the other woman
kept me awake.  For the first time since my marriage I felt homesick for
the prairies.


And then we were invited to visit Tom’s Aunt Elizabeth in Boston and
meet the whole family.  I was sick with dread.  I begged Tom to tell me
some of the things I should and should not do.

“Be your own sweet self and they ‘ll love you,” he promised, kissing me.
He meant it, dear soul; but I knew better.

From the very first minute, Tom’s Aunt Elizabeth made me conscious of
her disapproval.  In after years I won the old lady’s affection and real
respect, but I never spent a completely happy hour in her presence.

The night we arrived she gave me a formal dinner.  Some dozen additional
guests dropped in later, and I was bewildered by new faces and strange
names.  Later in the evening I noticed a distinguished-looking
middle-aged gentleman standing alone just outside the drawing-room door.
Hurrying out, I invited him to come in.  He inquired courteously if
there was anything he could do for me.

“Yes, indeed,” I assured him.  “Come in and talk to me.”  He looked shy
and surprised.  I insisted.  Then Tom’s aunt called me and, drawing me
hastily into a corner, demanded why I was inviting a servant into her
drawing-room.

“Servant! He looks like a senator,” I protested.  “He’s dressed exactly
like every other man at the party and he looks twice as important as
most of them.”

“Didn’t you notice he addressed you as ‘Madam’?” pursued Aunt Elizabeth.

“But it ‘s perfectly proper to call a married woman ‘Madam.’
Foreigners always do,” I defended.

“Can’t you tell a servant when you see one?” inquired the old lady
icily.

I begged to know how one could.  All Boston was summed up in her answer:
“You are supposed to know the other people.”

Tom’s wife could have drowned in a thimble.


The third day of our visit, we were at the dinner table, when I saw Aunt
Elizabeth’s face change--for the worse.  Her head went up higher and her
upper lip drew longer.  Finally she turned to me.

“Why do you cut your meat like a dog’s dinner?” she snapped.

Tom’s protesting exclamation did not stop her.

I laid my knife and fork on my plate and folded my hands in my lap to
hide their trembling.

Time may dim many hurts, but with the last flicker of intelligence I
shall remember that scene.  Even then, in a flash, I saw the symbolism
of it.

On one side--rare mahogany, shining silver, deft servants, napkins to
rumple, leisure for the niceties of life.  On the other hand--a log
cabin, my tired mother with new babies always coming, father slaving to
homestead a claim and push civilization a little farther over our
American continent.

A great tenderness for my parents filled my heart and overflowed in my
eyes.  I have, I confess, had moments of bitterness toward them.  But
that was not one of them.

“I think I can tell you,” I answered, as quietly as I could.  “It ‘s
very simple.  I was the first baby, and mother cut up my food for me.
After a while she cut up food for two babies.  By the time the third
came, I had to do my own cutting.  Naturally, I did it just as mother
had.  Then I began to help cut up food for the other babies.  It ‘s a
baby habit.  And I must now learn to cut one bite at a time like a
civilized grown person.”

Even Aunt Elizabeth was silenced.  But Tom rose from the table,
swearing.  My father would not have permitted a cowpuncher to use such
language before my mother.  But I loved Tom for it.

However, I did not sleep that night.  Next morning Tom’s Aunt Elizabeth
apologized, and for Back Bay was really unbending.

Some days later we returned to New York, and I thought my troubles were
over for a time.  But the first night Tom came home full of excitement.
He had been appointed to the diplomatic corps, and we were to sail for
England within a month!

The news struck chill terror to my heart.  With so much still to learn
in my native America, what on earth should I do in English society?




II.

More than two months passed after the night my husband announced his
foreign appointment before we sailed for England.

I planned to study and to have long talks with him about the customs of
fashionable and diplomatic Europe, but alas!  I reckoned without the
friends and pretended friends who claim the time of a man of Tom’s
importance.  Besides, he and I had so many other things to discuss.

So the sailing time approached, and then he announced that we were to be
presented at court! I was thrilled half with fear and half with joy.

I remembered from my reading of history that some of England’s kings had
not spoken English and that French had been the court language.  I
visited a bookstore and purchased what was recommended as an easy road
to French, and spent all morning learning to say, “l’orange est un
fruit.”  I read the instructions for placing the tongue and puckering
the lips and repeated les and las until I was dizzy.  Then I looked
through our bookcases for a life of Benjamin Franklin.  I knew he had
gone to court and “played with queens.”

But the great statesman-author-orator gave me no guide to correct form
or English social customs.  Instead I grew so interested in the history
of his work in England and France and in his inspiring achievement in
obtaining recognition and credit for the United States that dinner time
arrived before I realized I had not discovered what language was spoken
at court, nor what one talked about, nor if one talked at all.

Tom roared when I made my confession.  With his boyish good humor he
promised to answer all my questions on board ship.

So, without a care in those delicious days that followed, I wandered
down Sixth Avenue to New York’s then most correct shops, buying clothes
and clothes and clothes.  I bought practical and impractical gifts for
the twins back in Wisconsin and for all the family and those good
friends who had helped me through Madison.

The week before we sailed my husband said, out of a clear sky: “Be sure
you have the right clothes, Mary.  The English are a conservative lot.”
 Suddenly I was conscious again that I did not know the essential things
the wife of a diplomat ought to know--what to wear and when, a million
and one tremendous social trifles.

The moment our magnificent liner left the dock I heaved a sigh of
relief.  Tom would be mine for two whole weeks, and all the questions I
had saved up would be answered.  That evening he announced: “We don’t
dress for dinner the first night out.”

“Dress for dinner?” I asked.  “What do you mean?”

And then very gently he gave me my first lesson.  I had never seen
anything bigger than a ferry-boat.  How could I guess that even on an
ocean liner we did not leave formality behind?  The “party dresses”,
so carefully selected, the long, rich velvet cape I had thought
outrageously extravagant, and the satin slippers and the suede--I had
packed them all carefully in the trunk and sent them to the hold of the
ship.  But, with the aid of a little cash, the steward finally produced
my treasure trunk, and thereafter I dressed for dinner.

The two weeks I had expected my husband to give me held no quiet hours.
There is no such thing, except when one is seasick, as being alone
aboard a ship.  Tom was popular, good at cards and deck games, always
ready to play.  And the fourth day out I was too ill to worry about the
customs at the Court of St. James.

It was not until just before we reached England that I began to feel
myself again.  I stood on deck, thrilled with the tall ships and the
steamers, the fishing smacks and the smaller craft in Southampton
harbor.

“What will be the first thing you do in London?” somebody asked me.

“Go to Mayfair to find the home of Becky Sharp,” I answered.  Becky
Sharp was as much a part of English history to me as Henry VIII or Anne
Boleyn or William the Conqueror.  When my husband and I were alone he
said: “I think they have picked out No. 21 Curzon Street as the house
where Becky Sharp is supposed to have lived.  But what a funny thing for
you to want to see first!”

I remembered what old Lord Steyne had said to Becky: “You poor little
earthen pipkin.  You want to swim down the stream with great copper
kettles.  All women are alike.  Everybody is striving for what is not
worth the having.”

I was quite sure I did not want to drift down the stream with copper
kettles.  I only wanted to be with Tom, to see England with him, to
enjoy Dr. Johnson’s haunts, to go to the “Cheddar Cheese” and the
Strand, to Waterloo Bridge, and down the road the Romans built before
England was England.

I wanted to see the world without the world seeing me.  In my heart was
no desire to be a copper kettle.  But I had been cast into the stream,
and down it I must go, like a little fungus holding to the biggest
copper kettle I knew.

I told my husband this.  It was the first time he had been really
irritated with me.  “Why do you worry about these things?” he protested.
“You have a good head and a good education.  You are the loveliest woman
in England.  Be your own natural self and the English will love you.”
 But I remembered another occasion when he had told me to be my own
natural sweet self.

“How about what happened to Becky?” I asked.

Tom went into a rage.  “Why do you insist on comparing yourself with
that little ------!” The word he used was an ugly one.  I did not speak
to him again until after we had passed the government inspectors.


I shall never forget my first day in London, the old, quiet city where
everybody seemed so comfortable and easy-going.  There was no show, no
pretense.  The people in the shops and on the street bore the earmarks
of thrift.  I understood where New England got its spirit.

The first morning at the Alexandra Hotel, Tom fell naturally into the
European habit of having coffee and fruit and a roll brought to his bed.
I wanted to go down to the dining room.  My husband said it was not done
and I would be lonesome.  The days of ranch life had taught me to get up
with the chickens.  But it was not done in London.  The second morning
the early sun was too much for me.  I dressed, left the hotel, and
walked for several hours before a perfect servant brought shining plates
and marmalade, fruit and coffee to my big husky football player’s
bedside.  I have lived many years in Europe, but I have never grown used
to having breakfast brought to my room.

That second rainy morning Tom left me alone with the promise of being
back for luncheon.  I picked up a London morning paper and glanced at
the personal column.  I have read it every day since when I could get
hold of the London Times.  All of human nature and the ups and downs of
man are there, from secondhand lace to the mortgaged jewels of
broken-down nobility, from sporting games and tickets for sale to
relatives wanted, and those mysterious, suggestive, unsigned messages
from home or to home.  I read the news of the war.  We in America did
not know there was a war.  But Greece and Crete were at each other’s
throats, and Turkey was standing waiting to crowd the little ancient
nation into Armenia or off the map.  There was the Indian famine--We did
not talk about it at home, but it had first place in the London paper.
And the Queen’s birthday,--it was to be celebrated by feeding the poor
of East London and paying the debts of the hospitals.  There was
something so humane, so kindly, so civilized about it all!  “I love
England,” I said, and that first impression balanced the scale many a
time later when I did not love her.


The third or fourth day brought an invitation to dine at a famous house
on Grosvenor Square--with a duke!

I pestered my husband with questions.  What should I wear?  What should
I talk about?  He just laughed.

The paper had reported a “levee ordered by the queen”, describing the
gowns and jewels worn by the ladies.

I had little jewelry--a diamond ring, which Tom gave me before we were
married, a bracelet, two brooches, and a string of gold beads, which
were fashionable in America.  I put them all on with my best bib and
tucker.  When we were dressed, Tom gave me one look and said, “Why do
you wear all that junk?”  I took off one of the brooches and the string
of gold beads.

When our carriage drew up to the house on Grosvenor Square, liveried
servants stood at each side of the door, liveried servants guided us
inside.  There was a gold carpet, paintings of ladies and gentlemen in
gorgeous attire, and murals and tapestries in the marble halls.  But I
quickly forgot all of this grandeur listening to the names of guests
being called off as they entered the drawing-room: Mr. Gladstone and
Mrs. Gladstone, Lord Rosebery and the Marquis of Salisbury, Mrs. Humphry
Ward, looking fatter and older than I had expected, officers, colonels,
viscounts, and ladies, and then Tom and Mary--but they were not called
off that way.  I wanted to meet Mr. Gladstone, and hoped I might even be
near him at dinner; but I sat between a colonel and a young captain of
the Scots Greys.


Mr. Gladstone was on the other side of the table.  It was a huge table,
more than five feet wide and very long.  My husband was somewhere out of
sight at the other end.  Mr. Gladstone mentioned the fund being raised
for the victims of the Paris Opera Comique fire.  It is good form to be
silent in the presence of death, especially when death is colossal, and
the English never fail to follow good form.  There was a sudden lull at
our end of the table.

It was I who broke that silence.  I was touched by the generosity of
England, and said so.  Since my arrival I had daily noted that England
was giving to India, sending relief to Greece and Armenia, raising a
fund for the fire sufferers, and celebrating the Queen’s Jubilee by
feeding the poor.  I addressed my look and my admiring words to Mr.
Gladstone.

Either my sincerity or the embarrassment he knew would follow my
disregard of “the thing that is done” moved Mr. Gladstone’s sympathy.
He smiled across the table at me and answered, “I am so glad you see
these good points of England.”  It was about the most gracious thing
that was ever done to me in my life.  In England it is bad form to speak
across the table.  One speaks to one’s neighbor on the right or to one’s
neighbor on the left; but the line across the table is foreign soil and
must not be shouted across.

That night my husband said: “I forgot to tell you.  They never talk
across the table in England.” I chided him, and with some cause.  I had
soon discovered that in England, as in America, it was not enough to be
“my own natural self.”  But I came to love Mr. Gladstone.  Long after
that I told him the story of Mrs. Grant, who, when an awkward young man
had broken one of her priceless Sevres after-dinner coffee cups, dropped
hers on the floor to meet him on the same level.  “Any woman who, to put
any one at ease, will break a priceless Sevres cup is heroic,” I said.
His answer, though flippant, was pleasant: “Any man who would not smile
across the table at a lovely woman is a fool.”

Mr. Gladstone always wore a flower in his button-hole, a big, loose
collar that never fitted, a floppy black necktie, and trousers that
needed a valet’s attention.  He was the greatest combination of
propriety and utter disregard of conventions I had ever seen.

The event next in importance to a presentation at court was a tea at
which the tea planter Sir Thomas Lipton was one of the guests.  He was
not Sir Thomas then, but was very much in the limelight, having
contributed twenty-five thousand pounds to the fund collected by the
Princess of Wales to feed the poor of London in commemoration of Queen
Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.

The Earl of Lathom, then the Lord Chamberlain, who looked like Santa
Claus and smiled like Andrew Carnegie, was among the guests; so were Mr.
and Mrs. Gladstone.  Since the night he had talked to me across the
table I always felt that Mr. Gladstone was my best friend in England.
He had a sense of humor, so I said: “Is there anything pointed in asking
the tea king to a tea?”  That amused Gladstone.  He could not forgive
Lipton parting his hair in the middle.

That night I repeated my joke to Tom.  Instead of smiling, he said:
“That’s not the way to get on in England.  It ‘s too Becky Sharpish.”


And then came the day of the queen’s salon.  Victoria did not often have
audiences, the Prince of Wales or some other member of the royal family
usually holding levees and receiving presentations in her name.

Tom had warned me that there were certain clothes to be worn at a
presentation.  I asked one of my American friends at the embassy, who
directed me to a hairdresser--the most important thing, it seemed, being
one’s head.  She told me also to wear full evening dress, with long
white gloves, and to remove the glove of the right hand.

The hairdresser asked about my jewels.  Remembering what Tom had said
about “junk”, I said I would wear no jewels.  She was horrified, I would
have to wear some, she insisted, if only a necklace of pearls.  She
tactfully suggested that if my jewels had not arrived I could rent them
from Mr. Somebody on the Strand.  It was frequently done, she said, by
foreigners.

My friend at the embassy was politely surprised that Tom’s wife would
think of renting real or imitation jewels.  In the end I insisted upon
going without jewels.  I had the required plumes in my hair, and the
veil that was correct form at court, and my lovely evening gown and
pearl-embroidered slippers, which were to me like Cinderella’s at the
ball.

Before I left the hotel I asked Tom to look at me critically.  I was
still young--very young, very much in love, and unacquainted with the
ways of the world, and so heaven came down into my heart when Tom took
me into his arms and, kissing me, said: “There was never such a lovely
queen.”

It was about three o’clock when we reached the Pimlico entrance.
Guards were on duty, and men who looked like princes or very important
personages in costume, white stockings, black pumps, buckles, breeches,
and gay coats, stood at the door.  Inside the hall a gold carpet
stretched to the marble stairs.  It was a wonderful place, and I wanted
to stop and look.  I was conscious of being a “rubber-neck.”  I might
never see another palace again.

We were guided up wonderful stairs and led into a sumptuous room, where,
with the other guests, we waited for the arrival of the queen and the
royal family.  No one does anything or says anything at a salon.  A
“drawing-room” is a sacred rite in England.  It is recorded on the first
page of the news, taking precedence over wars, decisions of supreme
courts, famines, and international controversies.  Her Majesty receives.
To the Englishman, to be presented at court is to be set up in England
as class, to be worshiped by those who have not been in the presence of
the queen, and to pay a little more to the butcher and milliner.

I should have loved that “drawing-room” if I could have avoided the
presentation.  It was an impressive picture--the queen with a face like
a royal coin, a fine, generous forehead and beautiful nose, her
intelligent and kindly eyes, her ample figure, her dignity come from
long, long years of rule.  Back of her the Prince of Wales and the Prime
Minister, who in later years I found myself always comparing to little
Mr. Carnegie, the Viscount Curzon with his royal look, and in the
foreground Sir S. Ponsonby-Fane, in white silk stockings, pumps and
buckles, with sword and gold lace, and high-collared swallow-tailed
coat.  I admired the queen’s black moire dress, her headdress of
priceless lace, her diamonds, her high-necked dress held together with
more diamonds, and her black gloves, in striking contrast to our own.  I
was enjoying the picture.

Then my name was called.


I had been thinking such kindly things of England--Mr. Balfour fighting
for general education; Mr. Gladstone struggling to make England push
Turkey back and save Greece; all England raising money for the fire
sufferers of Paris and the Indian famine.  What a humanitarian race they
were!  I felt as pro-England as any of the satellites in that room, and
almost as much awed.  But back of it all was a natural United States
be-natural-as-you-were-born impulse.  Neither Back Bay Boston nor Tom’s
Philadelphia friends had been able to repress it.  When my name was
called and I stepped up, I made the little bow I had practised for hours
the day before and that morning; and then, as I looked into the eyes of
the queen, I held out my hand!  It was the instinctive action of a
free-born American.

I have realized in the years since what a real queen she was.  Smiling,
she extended her hand--but not to be touched.  It was a little wave, a
little imitation of my own impulsive outstretching to a friend; then her
eyes went to the next person, and I was on my way, having been presented
at court and done what “is not done” in England.

Tom’s mission in England was important.  He had friends, and there were
distinguished people in England who regarded him and his family of
sufficient value to “take us aboard.”  They were most gracious and
kindly.  But Tom’s eyes were not smiling.


That night my husband said some very frank things to me.  His position,
and even the credit of our country to some extent, depended upon our
conduct.  He did not say he was ashamed of me, and in my heart I do not
think he was; but he regretted that I had not been trained in the little
things upon which England put so much weight.  He suggested my employing
a social secretary.

“What I need, Tom,” I said, “is a teacher.  You have told me these
customs are not important.  They are important.  I need some one to
teach them to me, and I propose to get a teacher.”

In the personal columns of the Times I had read this advertisement:

         ‘A lady of aristocratic birth and social training
          desires to be of service to a good-paying guest.’

I swallowed my pride and answered it.  I was not her paying guest, but I
employed this Scotch lady of aristocratic birth and social experience.

On the first day at luncheon, which we ate privately in my apartment,
she said: “In England a knife is held as you hold a pen, the handle
coming up above the thumb and between the thumb and first finger.”  My
sense of humor permitted me to ask, after trying it once, “What do you
do when the meat is tough?”  The Scotch aristocrat never smiled.  “It is
n’t,” she answered.

I was humiliated and a little soul-sick before that luncheon ended.
I had been told to break each bite of my bread; a lady never bites a
piece of bread.  I had been told to use a knife to separate my fish,
when I had learned, oh, so carefully, in America to eat fish with a fork
and a piece of bread.  I might have laughed about it all had not so much
been at stake, even Tom’s respect.




III.

The Scotch lady of aristocratic birth and social experience lived with
me one terrible week.  On the seventh day I came home from shopping with
presents for the twins back in Wisconsin.  A day or so earlier, while my
mentor was out of the room, I had asked the chef waiter of our floor
about himself and his family, and found that his family too included
twins.  So with the present for my family I also brought some for his.

Mr. MacLeod, the member of Parliament from Scotland, and Lord Lansdowne
happened to be calling when I arrived, and Tom and the Scotch lady were
there.  The chef waiter was taking the coats of the gentlemen callers.
I received the guests, acknowledged the introductions, and then, as I
removed my own coat, I handed him the little package.

When we were alone the Scotch lady turned to me.  “In England,” she
said, “ladies never converse with their servants, particularly in the
presence of guests.”

Then she sealed her doom.  “Ladies never make gifts to their servants,”
 she added.  “Their secretaries, housekeepers, or companions disburse
their bounty.”

I remembered the old U. S. A.  An American chef waiter might hope to be
the father of a President.  On the ranch I had cooked for men of less
education and much worse manners than this domestic who brought my
athletic husband’s breakfast to his bedside and who happened to be the
proud father of twins.

I would learn table manners from an English lady of aristocratic birth
and social experience; but when it came to the human act of a little
gift to a faithful servant, I declared my American independence.

I was homesick for Wisconsin, homesick for real and simple people.
I wanted to go home!  That night Tom and I had our first real quarrel,
and it was over my dismissal of the Scotch lady of aristocratic birth.
Life became intolerable for a while.  I dragged through days of bitter
homesickness.  Nothing seemed real.  No one seemed sincere.  Life was a
stage.  Everybody seemed to be acting a part and speaking their pieces
with guttural voices.  Even my husband’s voice sounded different--or
else I realized for the first time that Boston apes London English.  Tom
had learned his mother tongue in Boston, and now suddenly he seemed like
a foreigner to me simply because he spoke like these other foreigners.
The sun went out of my heaven.  I was dumb with loneliness and sick with
the fear of lost faith.  Could it be that my husband was affecting these
English mannerisms?  Certainly he seemed at home in England, while I
seemed to be adrift, alone in an arctic ocean.

I had no friend in England, and more and more my husband’s special work
was engrossing him.  When we were together I felt tongue-tied.  He had
tried to be gentle with me; but I was strange in this world of his, and
lonely and sensitive.  I had dreamed so much of this world, and now that
I was in it, it was false and petty.  I longed for the United States,
for my Northwest, for my hills and wide, far plains.  I wanted to meet
somebody from Madison who smiled like a friend.

One day Tom looked at me searchingly, and said I must be ill.

I confessed to a little homesickness.  Tom became very attentive.
He took me sightseeing.  We lunched at the quaint inn where Dickens
found his inspiration for “Pickwick Papers” and where the literary
lights of London foregathered and still foregather for luncheon.  We sat
in one of the cozy little stalls--just Tom and I.

Suddenly it swept over me that life had gone all wrong.  Here was a
dream come true, and no joy in my heart.  Tom asked me for my thoughts.
I told him, quite frankly, I was thinking of home.  I was thinking of
mother in her cotton house dress with her knitted shawl around her
shoulders, of father in his jeans and high boots tramping over the range
with the men; I saw the cow and the pigs and the chickens, the smelly
corral and the water hole, the twins trying to rub each other’s face in
the mud.  And I was thinking--Tom would n’t fit into my world, and I
could not belong to his.  That was the second time I heard Tom swear.
He wanted to know what kind of a snob I thought he was.  He’d be as much
at home with dad on the ranch as he was in London.  “The fault is with
you,” he said.  “You ‘re not adaptable, and you don’t try to be.”

Tom did n’t understand.  He never did.  In all the years together, which
he made so rich and happy, Tom never understood how hard and bitter a
school was that first year of my married life.  But Tom did try to give
me a good time in London.  He took me to interesting places and we were
entertained by a number of people, mostly ponderous and stupid.  Tom did
not suggest that we entertain in our turn.  I think he felt I was not
ready for it, although even in after years, when we talked frankly about
many things, he would never admit this.

I shall never forget my first week-end party in England.  I was not
well, and Tom, manlike, felt sure the change, a trip down to Essex and
new people, would do me good.  The thought of the country and a visit
with some good simple country folk appealed to me too, so I packed the
bags and met Tom at Victoria Station at eleven o’clock.  Alas! It is a
far cry from a Montana ranch to a gentleman’s estate in England!  My
vision of a quiet visit “down on a farm” vanished the minute we stepped
off the train.  Liveried coachmen collected our baggage.  They seemed to
be discussing something; then I heard Tom say: “I guess that ‘s all.
I ‘ll wire back for the rest of it.”


We were led to a handsome cart drawn by a fine tandem team, and Tom and
I were alone for a minute.

“My God, Mary!” he burst out, “didn’t you bring any clothes for us?”

“I certainly have,” I retorted, sure I was in the right this time.
“Your nightshirt and my nightgown; your toilet articles and mine; a
change of underclothes; a clean shirt and two collars for you, and my
new striped silk waist.”

I shall never forget Tom’s expression.

“Do you know where we are going?” he groaned.  “To one of the grandest
houses in England!  Oh, Lord! I ought to have told you.  You ‘ll need
all the clothes you have down here.  And--and a valet and maid will
unpack the bags--oh, hell!”  After more of the same kind of talk, he
began to cook up some yarn to tell the valet.

Suddenly all that is free-born in me rose to the surface.  “Is it the
thing for gentlemen to be afraid of the valet?” I asked my husband.
“Does a servant regulate your life and set your standards?”

Tom was quiet for several moments; then he took my hand and said very
earnestly: “Mary, don’t you ever lose your respect for the real things.
It will save both of us.”  After a while he added: “Just the same, I ‘ll
have to lie out of this baggage hole.”

He did, in a very casual, laughing way--such a positive set of lies that
I marveled and began to wonder how much of Tom was acting and how much
was real.

Tom went back to London on the next train, and reached the “farm” with
our baggage before it was time to dress for the eight-o’clock dinner.

The dinner was long and stupid.  After dinner the women went into the
drawing-room and gossiped about politics and personalities until the men
joined them, when they sat down to cards.  I did not know how to play
cards, and so was left with a garrulous old woman who had eaten and
drunk over-much.


It had been a long day for me.  I was ill and tired.  Suddenly sleep
began to overpower me.  I batted my eyes to keep them open.  I tried
looking at the crystal lights, but my leaden eyes could not face them.
The constant drone of that old woman was putting me to sleep.  I tried
to say a few words now and then to wake myself.  I felt myself slipping.
Once my head dropped and came up with a jerk.  I watched the great
French clock.  Its hands did not seem to move.  I looked at Tom.  He was
absorbed in his game.  I could not endure it another minute.  I went
over and said good night to my hostess who had spoken to me only once
since my arrival.

Drowsy as I was, I noticed she seemed surprised.  “Oh, no,” I told her;
“I am not ill, only very sleepy.”

How good my pillow felt!

The next morning Tom was cross.  I had made a _faux pas_.  I had shown I
was bored and peeved and had gone to bed before the hostess indicated it
was bedtime.  It “was n’t done” in England.

“What do you do if you can’t keep awake?” I asked.  “You slip out
quietly, go to your room ask a maid to call you after you have had forty
winks, then you go back and pretend you are having a good time,” said
Tom.

There were some bitter hours after we got back to London.  But Tom won,
and I promised to get a companion.  Then there came into my life the
most wonderful of friends.  She was the widow of a British Army officer
who had been killed in India, and her only child was dead.  She was a
woman of education and heart; she understood my needs, all of them, and
I interested her.  She had seen great suffering; she had a deep feeling
for humanity and an honest desire to be of use in the world.  In the
English register my companion was listed as the Honorable Evelyn, but we
quickly got down to Mary and Eve.  We loved each other.  Eve went to
France with us a few months later.  She made me talk French with her.
My first formal dinner in France was a pleasant surprise.  It was like a
great family party--not dull and quiet like the English dinner, and ever
so much more fun.  Everybody participated.  If there was one lion at the
table, everybody shared him.

[Illustration: p060.jpg  MY FIRST FORMAL DINNER IN FRANCE]

There is something in being born on a silken couch.  Nothing surprises
you.  You are at ease anywhere in the world.  Eve fitted into Paris as
naturally as in her native London, I began to feel at home there myself.
It was a city of happy people--care free, natural, sympathetic.  There
was a lack of restraint which, after the oppressive dignity of London,
was a rare treat.  No one was critical.  Every one accepted my halting
and faulty French without ridicule or condescension.  The amiability and
the friendliness of the French people thawed my heart and began to lift
me out of my slough of homesickness.  Happiness came back to me.

There had been hours in England when only the knowledge that a woman’s
rarest gift was coming to me, and that Tom was proud and happy about it,
kept me from running away--back to the simple life of my own United
States.

I was homesick for mother.  Babies were a mystery to me, although I had
helped mother with all of hers.  We had buried three of them in homemade
coffins--pioneering is a ruthless scythe, and only the fit survive.  I
began to understand my mother and the glory in the character which never
faltered, although she was alone and life had been hard.  How could I
whine when I had Tom and a good friend--and life was like a playground?

I loved the French.  They regard life with a frankness which sometimes
shocked my reserved Boston husband.  He never accepted intimacy.  The
restraint of old England was still in his blood.  The free winds of the
prairie had swept it from mine.

My new friends in Paris discovered my happy secret.  It was my
all-absorbing thought, and I was delighted to be able to discuss it
frankly.  Motherhood is the great and natural event in the life of a
woman in France, and no one makes a secret of it.  I was very happy in
Paris.  And then--Tom had to go to Vienna.

Not even Tom, Eve, and the promised baby could make me happy there.  In
all the world I had seen no place where the line of class distinction
was so closely drawn, where social customs were so rigid and court forms
so sacred, as at the Austrian capital.  Learning the social customs of
Vienna seemed as endless as counting the pebbles on the beach--and about
as useful.  The clock regulated our habits in Vienna.  Up to eleven
o’clock certain attire was proper.  If your watch stopped you were sure
to break a social law.  I once saw a distinguished diplomat in distress
because he found himself at an official function at eleven-thirty with a
black tie--or without one, I have forgotten which!

At first it offended me to receive an invitation--or a command--to
appear at a formal function, with an accompanying slip telling exactly
what to wear.  Then I laughed about it.

Finally I rebelled.  On the plea of ill health, I made Tom do the social
honors for me, while Eve and I did the museums and the galleries and the
music fetes.  Years later I went back to Vienna, and I did not discredit
my country.  But I never loved the city.  I enjoyed its art, its
fascinating shops, its picturesque streets and people, and its beautiful
women.  But for me Vienna has the faults of France and England, the
poverty and arrogance of London, and the frivolity of Paris, without
their redeeming qualities.


So I was glad to return to England.  The second day in London, Tom took
me to an exhibition important in the art world, or at least in the
official life of London.  Everybody who was somebody was there.  I saw
the Princess of Wales and the Marquis of Salisbury, who was then
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.  I saw Mr. Balfour, so handsome
and gracious that I refused to believe there had ever been cause to call
him “Bloody Balfour.”  There was something kingly about him--yet he was
simply Mr. Balfour.  Years afterward I realized that to know Mr. Balfour
is either to worship him or hate him.  No one takes the middle course.
I had begun to have a beautiful time that afternoon.

I felt happy, acutely conscious of my blessings and of one coming
blessing in particular.  Mr. Gladstone joined us, and Sir Henry Irving
came over to speak to Eve.  She told him I had just said that England
had a mold for handsome men.  Irving was interesting and striking,
though certainly not handsome; but he took the compliment to himself,
smiled, bowed his thanks, and said:

“And America for beautiful women.”

Mr. Gladstone, too, could indulge in small talk.  “You should have seen
her rosy cheeks before she went to the Continent,” he said, and added
kindly that I looked very tired and should go down to Hawarden Castle
and rest.

“Oh,” I explained happily, “it is n’t that--I ‘m not tired.  It is such
a happy reason!”  I felt Eve gasp.  Mr. Gladstone opened his kind eyes
very wide, and his heavy chin settled down in his collar.  It was the
last bad break I made.  But it was a blessing to me, for it robbed all
social form of terror.  For the first time, I realized that custom is
merely a matter of geography.  One takes off one’s shoes to enter the
presence of the ruler of Persia.  One wears a black tie until eleven
o’clock in Vienna--or does n’t.  One uses fish knives in England until
he dines with royalty--then one must manage with a fork and a piece of
bread.  One dresses for dinner always, and waits for the hostess to say
it is time, and speaks only to one’s neighbor at table.  In France one
guest speaks to any or all of the others; all one’s friends extend
congratulations if a baby is coming; one shares all his joys with
friends.  But in England nobody must know, and everybody must be
surprised.  No one ever speaks of himself in England.  They are
sensitive about everything personal.  But there is an underground and
very perfect system by which everything about everybody is known and
noised about and discussed with everybody except the person in question.
It is a mysterious and elaborate hypocrisy.


With the aid of Eve, I made a thorough study of the geography of social
customs.  I learned the ways of Europe, of the Orient, and of South
America.  It is easier to understand races if one understands the
psychology of their customs.  I realized that social amenities are too
often neglected in America, and our manners sometimes truthfully called
crude.  But I told myself with pride that our truly cultivated people
will not tolerate a social form that is not based on human, kindly
instincts.  It was not until the World War flooded Europe with American
boys and girls that I realized the glory of our social standards and the
great need to have our own people understand those standards.




IV.

Fear is the destroyer of peace.  I knew no peace until I learned not to
be afraid of conventions.  The three most wretched years in my life
might easily have been avoided by a little training at home or at
school.

I realize now the unhappiness of those first years of my married life.
I was awkward and ill at ease in a world that valued social poise above
knowledge.  From my childhood I had loved honest, sincere people.  After
my marriage I met distinguished men and women, even a few who might be
called great; but they, too, had their affectations and petty vanities.
Being young, I judged them harshly because they set what I considered
too much store upon absurd conventions.

In the course of my travels since, I have come to realize that social
customs are a simple matter of geography!  What is proper in England is
bad form in France, and many customs that were correct in Vienna would
be intolerable in Spain.  In the formal circles of Vienna no one spoke
to anybody without an introduction.  In Spain there was a more subtle
and truly aristocratic standard.  The assumption was that anybody one
met in the home of one’s host was desirable, and it was courtesy,
therefore, to begin a conversation with any guest.  This is the attitude
also in parts of France.

But in those first months I had not acquired my philosophy.  I lived
through homesick days, and some that were hard and bitter.  I stayed
with Tom that first year only because I was too bewildered to take any
initiative, and because I kept hoping that things would right themselves
and I would wake out of my nightmare.  My baby came in the second year,
and then I could not go home.  The simple life of my own people slipped
very, very far away.  We made a hurried trip back to the United States
that summer, but Tom would not consent to my going West.  His own family
wanted to see our baby, and they decided that the little fellow had
traveled enough and should not be subjected to the hardships of a
cross-country train trip.  So Tom sent for mother and the twins to come
to us, and they arrived at the Waldorf Hotel, where we were staying.
Dear, simple mother, in her terrible clothes, and the twins, got up with
more thought for economy than for beauty!  I shopped extravagantly with
them.  The youngsters wanted to see everything in New York; but mother,
despite all of those hard, lonely years in our rough country and the
many interesting things for her to do and see in New York--mother wanted
nothing better than to stay with the baby.


With all the children she had brought into this world one might think
she had seen enough of babies.  But she adored my little son.  How near
she seemed to me then!  How hungry I had been for her, without realizing
it!  I felt that she loved my baby boy as she had never loved me or any
of her own children.  And I understood why mother never had had time to
love her own babies.  In the struggle for existence of those hard years
she had never had a minute to indulge in the pure joy of having her
baby.  I sat watching her with her first grandchild, so sweet in his
exquisite hand-sewn little clothes, and suddenly I found myself crying
hysterically.

Mother was very dear to me from that day.  Later in this chronicle I
want to give a chapter to my mother and what we both suffered during
this period of her visit to New York, for it marked the climax of my own
development.  When mother and the children started off on their return
trip to the West, Tom sent them flowers and candy and fruit.  He had
already generously put financial worry away from my family for all time,
but I knew that he was a little ashamed of some of mother’s crudities.
I wondered why I did not feel ashamed.  I was very, very glad I did not.
It gave me something tangible to cling to--a sure consciousness of
power, that comes of knowing one possesses the true pride to rise above
the opinions of other people.

I would have given my life, that day, to be able to assure my family
that material security which they owed to my husband, who neither loved
nor understood them.  I looked down the years and saw myself crushed by
a burden of indebtedness to a man I felt I no longer loved.  Only
mother’s grateful, simple happiness eased my hurt.  I had never
approached my mother, but I knew now that if her natural dignity and
great, kind heart had been given the advantages that the women in my
husband’s family took as a matter of course, she would have been
superior to them all.  Yet they barely tolerated mother--no more.

I longed to go home to my own warm, hearty, open West.  I stood on the
ferry after they had gone, thinking that, if my family were not so
deeply indebted to my husband, I would leave him.  I suppose I did not
really mean that thought, but it made me unhappy.  I felt disloyal and
dishonest.  Finally I told Tom.  There was a scene; but from that day he
began to understand me, and things were better.  A few days later we
came home from a dinner party, and, after going to the baby’s room for a
minute, Tom asked me to stay and talk.  But he did not talk.  For a long
time he sat smoking and thinking.  I knew he had something on his mind,
and I waited.  Finally I realized that he was embarrassed.

“Can I help? Is it something I have done that has embarrassed you?” I
asked.


That was many years ago, but I can never forget the look Tom gave me.
It held all the love of our courtship and something besides that I had
never seen in his face before.

“For God’s sake, never say that to me again!” he cried.  “Embarrassed
me! I am proud of you--you never can know how proud.  I was sitting here
trying to think how to tell you something my mother said about you, and
just what it means.”

His mother!  My heart dropped.  His mother had never said anything about
me, excepting criticism.  I had been a bitter disappointment to her.
Whatever she said would be politely cruel--at best, a damning with faint
praise.

“She said,” my husband went on, “that she is very happy in our marriage,
completely satisfied, and that she has come to be proud of you.  I don’t
know how to tell you just what that means.”

I knew.  I knew his mother could have given me no higher praise.  I had
learned what to her were the essentials; I had cultivated the manner she
placed above price.  But the realization brought self-distrust.  Had I
lost my honesty and sincerity?

Tom went on to tell me that his mother had particularly admired my
attitude toward my own mother, and the manner in which I met every
little failing of hers.  She felt I had a sense of true values in
people, and that the simplicity and sureness with which I had met this
situation was the essence of good breeding.

I had not thought it possible that Tom’s mother could understand my
feeling for my mother and my honest pride in her real worth.  Perhaps,
I reflected, I had been unjust to my mother-in-law.  I knew what a shock
I had been to her in the early days of our marriage, and I knew only too
well that even Tom had often regretted my ignorance of social usages.

They are simple customs, and should be taught in every school in
America, but I had not learned them.  I was happy that night and for
days afterward.

Then we went back to Europe.  Tom knew people on the steamer to whom I
took a dislike.  They were bold and even vulgar, and Tom admitted that
he did not admire them.  I made up my mind we should avoid them.  The
next afternoon I found Tom and that group walking the deck arm in arm,
chatting affably.  When we were alone, I asked Tom how he could do it.
I know now that a man cannot hold an official position like Tom’s and
ignore politically important people.  But he only said rather
carelessly, and with a laugh, that it was one of the prices a man pays
for public office.


After that I noticed that my husband was known to nearly every one.  He
had a glad hand and a smile for the public--because it was the public.
I watched to see if he had a slightly different smile for the people of
Back Bay and his own particular social class; sometimes I thought he
had, and it made me a little soul-sick.

I longed for a home for my baby and a few friends I could love and
really enjoy.  I was not fitted to be the wife of a public man.  It was
the poverty and crudeness of my youth that had made me intolerant.  One
of the big lessons life has taught me is that people can be amiable,
tolerant, and even friendly, and still be sincere.  The pleasantry of
social relations among the civilized peoples of the earth is a mere
garment we wear for our own protection and to cover our feelings.  It is
the oil of the machinery of life.  I have found that men and women who
take part in the big work of the earth wear that garment of civility and
graciousness, and yet have their strong friendships and even their
bitter enmities.

But I did not understand this when we went back to Europe.  I only knew
that my husband was amiable to people he did not like, and I questioned
how deep his affection for me went.  How much of his kindness to me was
just the easiest way and the manner of a gentleman?

A hard and bare youth had made me supersensitive and suspicious and
narrow.  I wanted to measure other people by the standards of my own
primitive years.  Out on the frontier we had judged life in the rough.
Courage and truth were the essentials.  A man fought his enemies out in
the open, and made no compromises.  There was nothing easy in life, no
smooth rhythm.  And I tried to drag forward with me, as I went, the bold
ethics of the frontier.  I resented good manners because I believed they
were a cloak of hypocrisy.

A few months after we returned to Europe the shadow of death crossed our
path, swiftly and terribly.  My little son died.  Other babies came to
us later, but that first little boy had brought more into my life than
all the rest of the world could ever give.  He had restored my faith in
life, my hope, and for a while was all my joy.

People were kind, but I felt that many called merely because it was
“good form”--“the thing to do.” Bitterness was creeping into my heart.

Yet why should it not be “the thing to do” to call on a bereaved mother?
It is a gesture of humanity.  Tom seemed very far away.  I felt that his
pride was hurt, perhaps his vanity; for he had boasted of the little
fellow and loved to show him off.  How little I understood!

I bring myself to tell these intimate things because there is a lesson
in them for other women--because I resent that any free-born American
citizen should be handicapped by lacking so small and easily acquired a
possession as poise, poise that comes with knowledge of the simple rules
of the social game.  It is my hope that this honest confession of my own
feelings, due directly to lack of training, may help other women, and
particularly other mothers whose children are now in the plastic years.

It was my utter lack of appreciation of manners and customs in my
husband’s class that estranged me from Tom.  I was resentful and
antagonistic merely because I was different.


My husband was suffering even as I was suffering; but no one realized
it, least of all myself.  Every one was especially kind to me, because I
was a woman.  People are rarely attentive and tender with men when loss
comes.  Men are supposed to be strong and self-controlled; their hearts
are rated as a little less deep and tender than the hearts of women; yet
when men are truly hurt they need love and care even as little children.

A month after the baby’s death, Tom and I were walking along the
Embankment in London one Saturday afternoon, when we met a small girl
carrying a little child.  The baby was too tired to walk any farther; it
was dirty, and was crying bitterly.  Tom stopped, spoke to the girl, and
offered to carry the baby, who soon quieted down on Tom’s shoulder.  At
the end of that walk Tom’s light summer suit was ruined.  I expected him
to turn with some trivial, jesting remark, but he said nothing.  I
looked at him and saw that his face was set and hard and his eyes wet.
Without looking at me, he said: “Don’t speak to me now.”

That moment of silence revealed to me my husband’s character better than
months of talking.

The next day my husband came to me and said:  “Mary, I have asked for a
leave of absence.  We are going back to the United States.  We are going
out West to have a visit with your family.”

Two years before I had believed that Tom would not fit into my
Northwest.  But in twenty-four hours Tom and my father were old pals.
He was as much at home with mother and the children as I, and all the
neighbors liked him.  He was interested in everything on the ranch, and
even in the small-town life of the village.  He interested father in
putting modern equipment on the ranch.  He went hunting with the men,
played games with the children, visited the little district schoolhouse,
and found joy in buying gifts for the youngsters.  When mother made a
big platter full of taffy, he pulled as enthusiastically as a boy.  As I
stood at the corral, one day, and watched Tom with my youngest brother,
I remembered him at the court of St. James, and I began to understand.

Tom was natural.  It was just a part of him to be kindly and gracious to
everybody.  I had never seen him angry with men of his own type, but I
saw him furious enough to commit murder when a man on the ranch tied up
a dog and beat her for running away.  In after years I saw Tom angry
with men of his own class; I saw him waging long, bitter fights against
public men who had betrayed public trust.  Something barbaric in me was
satisfied that my kind, gently bred man was one with the men of my own
tribe, who fought man and beast and the elements to take civilization
farther west.

Almost a generation slipped by between that visit to the West and the
next scene in my life of which I shall write.  Many things of personal
and of national importance happened meantime, but they have nothing to
do with this message to women.  I was in France when the World War
began.  I had been in Vienna again, and in England at regular intervals.
I had learned to accept life as I found it, and to get much joy out of
living.  Sometimes I chafed a little under the demands of social life
and needless formalities, but I accepted them as inevitable.


Then the world was torn in two.  The earth dripped in blood and sorrow.
Life became more difficult than on the frontier, and more elemental.  I
was present, in the first year of the war, in a house where the King and
Queen of the Belgians were guests, where great generals and great
statesmen had gathered on great and earnest and desperate business.  I
was only an onlooker, and I noticed what every one else was too absorbed
to see.  As the evening progressed, I realized that pomp and ceremony
had died with the youth of France.  King, generals, statesmen met as
human men pitting their wits against one another, desperately struggling
to find a way out of the hell into which they were falling.

Twice the king rose to his feet, and no one else stood.  They were all
too deep in the terrible question of war.

When the meeting was over and the guests of the house ready to retire,
the little queen said very quietly:  “Madam, may not my husband and I
occupy this room together?  It is very kind of you to arrange two suites
for us, but I am sure there are many guests here to-night--and, anyway,
I prefer to be near him.”

The war had done that.  Who would expect a queen to think of the
problems of housing guests, even a great queen?  And the war had made
the king not the king, but her man, very near and very dear.

Many other conventions I saw die by the way as the war progressed.  Then
America came in.

There is a temptation to talk about America in the war, but, after all,
that has no bearing on my story.  Soon after the United States entered,
American men and women began to arrive in Europe in great numbers.
I met them everywhere; sight-seeing, in offices, at universities, at
embassies and consulates.  I met them and loved them and suffered for
them.

I was proud of something they brought to France that France needed, and
I have no doubt that many of them took back to America something from
France that we need.

For pure mental quality and courage, no people on earth could match what
the American girls took to France.  It was the finest stuff in the
world.  They knew how to meet hardship without grumbling.  They knew how
to run a kitchen and see that hungry men were fed.  They knew how to
nurse, to run telephones, automobiles--anything that needed to be done.
Some failed and fell by the wayside, but they were the smallest possible
percentage.

Those American girls knew how to do everything--almost everything.

Two wonderful girls, one who ran a telephone for the army and another in
the “Y,” both from the Middle West, were at headquarters the day the
King and Queen of the Belgians arrived.  With others they were sent to
serve tea, and they served it.  The “Y” girl, taking a young captain
whose presence made her eyes glisten to her Majesty, said:

“Captain Blank, meet the queen.”

And the queen, holding out her hand, and never batting an eye to show
that all the conventions had been thrown to the winds, said:

“Captain, I am very happy to meet you.”

They served tea--served it to the king, the queen, the general of the
American army, and other important people.  There was cake besides tea,
and it was not easy to drink tea and eat cake standing.  The telephone
girl insisted that General Pershing must sit down.  The king was
standing, and of course, General Pershing continued to do the same.

“Will you sit down?” said another girl to the king.  “There are plenty
of chairs.”

That girl had done her job in France--a job of which many a man might
have been proud--and on her left breast she wore a military medal for
valor.  The king touched the medal, smiled at her, and said he was glad
there were plenty of chairs, for he knew places where there were not.

But General Pershing and his cake still bothered the little Illinois
girl, who went back at him again and asked him to sit down and enjoy his
cake.  The king indicated to the general to be seated.

No one but General Pershing would have known what to do between the rule
to stand when a king stands and the rule to obey the order of the king.
He gracefully placed his plate on the side of a table, half seated
himself on it, which was a compromise, and went on enjoying himself.
The king sat down.

If any one had told that girl the sacredness of the convention she had
ignored, she would have suffered as keenly as I had suffered in my
youth.  It was such a simple thing to learn; yet who in the middle of a
war would think of stopping to run a class in etiquette?  The point is
that any girl capable of crossing half the world to do a big job and a
hard one in a foreign land should have been given the opportunity to
learn the rules of social intercourse.


I saw some American girls and men on official occasions at private
houses and at official functions.  They were clever, attractive,
fascinating; but when they came to the end of their visit, they rose to
go, and then stood talking, talking, talking.  They did not know exactly
how to get away.  They did not want to be abrupt nor appear to be glad
to leave.

It would have been so simple for some one to say to them:  “One of the
first rules in social life is to get up and go when you are at the end
of your visit.”

I was in Paris when Marshal Joffre gave the American Ambassador, Mr.
Sharp, the gold oak leaves as a token of France’s veneration for
America.  There were young girls around us who did not hesitate to
comment on everybody there.  One little New Jersey girl insisted rather
audibly that Clemenceau looked like the old watchman on their block;
and a boy, a young officer, complained that General Foch “had not won
as many decorations as General Bliss and General Pershing.”  Some
youngsters asked high officers for souvenirs.  Many French people
perhaps did worse, but it hurt me to see even a few of our own splendid
young people guilty of such crudities, because our American youth is so
fine at heart.

When the great artist Rodin died, I went to the public ceremony held in
his memory.  Suddenly I realized that America and France each had
something left that war had not destroyed.  A young American art
student, who had given up his career for his uniform, and was invalided
back in Paris minus an arm, stood very near me.  As he turned to Colonel
House I heard him say:

“Rodin’s going is another battle lost.”

It was typical of the American quality of which we have cause to
boast--the fineness of heart that is in our young people.


The day of the armistice in France, those of us who are older stood
looking on and realizing that all class distinctions, all race, age, and
pursuits, had been wiped off the map.  People were just people.  There
was a complete abandon.  I am not a young woman, but I was caught up by
the fury of the crowd, and swept along singing, laughing, weeping.
Young soldiers passing would reach out to touch my hand, sometimes to
kiss me.

That night I believed that the war had broken down many of our barriers;
that all foolish customs had died; that the terrific price paid in human
blood and human suffering had at least left a world honest with itself,
simple and ready for good comradeship; that men were measured by
manliness and women by ideals.  It was a part of the armistice day
fervor, but I believed it.

And then I came home and went to Newport.




V.

Just before I came home to America in the Spring of 1919, I went to
Essex for a week-end  in one of those splendid old estates which are the
pride of England.

It was not my first visit, but I was awed anew by the immensity of the
place, its culture and wealth which seemed to have existed always, its
aged power and pride.  Whole lives had been woven into its window
curtains and priceless rugs; centuries of art lived in the great
tapestries; successive generations of great artists had painted the
ancestors of the present owner.

All three sons of that house went into the war.  One never returned from
Egypt, another is buried in Flanders.  Only the youngest returned.

At first glance the smooth life seemed unchanged in the proud old house.
But before sundown of my first day there, I knew that life had put its
acid test to the shield and proved it pure gold.

War taxes had fallen heavily on the estate and it was to be leased to an
American.  Until then, the castle was a home to less fortunate buddies
of the owner’s sons.

But these were not the tests I mean, neither these nor the courage and
the poise of that family in the face of their terrible loss, nor their
effort to make every one happy and comfortable.

It was an incident at tea time that opened my eyes.  The youngest son,
now the only son, came in from a cross-country tramp and brought with
him a pleasant faced young woman whom he introduced as “one of my pals
in the war.”


That was enough.  Lady R. greeted her as one of the royal blood.  The
girl was the daughter of a Manchester plumber.  She had done her bit,
and it had been a hard bit, in the war, and now she was stenographer in
a near-by village.  Later in the afternoon the story came out.  She had
been clerk in the Q. M. corps and after her brother’s death she asked
for service near the front, something hard.  She got it.  The mules in
the supply and ammunition trains must be fed and it was her job to get
hay to a certain division.  The girl had ten motor trucks to handle and
twenty men, three of them noncommissioned officers.

After four days, during which trucks had disappeared and mules gone
unfed, she asked the colonel for the rank of first sergeant, with only
enlisted men under her.

Her first official orders were: All trucks must stay together.  If one
breaks down, the others will stop and help.

The second day of her new command, she met our young host, who needed a
truck to move supplies and tried to commandeer one of hers.  When she
refused, he ordered her.  He was a captain.

“I am under orders to get those ten loads of hay to the mules,” was her
reply.

“What will you do if I just take one of them?” asked the captain.

“You won’t,” said the girl confidently.

“I must get a truck,” he insisted.  “What can you do about it if I take
one of yours?”

“England needs men,” she answered.  “But if you made it necessary I’d
have to shoot you.  If the mules are n’t fed, you and other men can’t
fight.  If you were fit to be a captain, you’d know that.”


The young captain told the story himself and his family enjoyed it,
evidently admiring the Manchester lassie, who sat there as red as a
poppy.  They did not bend to the plumber’s daughter, nor seem to try to
lift her to the altars of their ancient hall.

Every one met on new ground, a ground where human beings had faced death
together.  It was sign of a new fellowship, too deep and fine for even a
fish knife to sever.  There was no consciousness of ancient class.
There was only to-day and to-morrow.

It was the America I love--that spirit.  The best America--valuing a
human being for personal worth.  Then I sailed for home.  I went to
Newport, to the Atlantic coast resorts.  They were all the same.

The world had changed but not my own country.

I saw more show of wealth, more extravagance, more carelessness,
more reckless morals than ever before, and--horrible to
contemplate--springing up in the new world, the narrow social standards
which war had torn from the old.

Social lines tightened.  Men who had been overwhelmingly welcome while
they wore shoulder straps were now rated according to bank accounts or
“family.” The “doughboy shavetail”, a hero before the armistice, or the
aviator who held the stage until November eleventh, once he put on his
serge suit and went back to selling insurance or keeping books, became a
nodding acquaintance, sometimes not even that.

I was heartsick.  I thought often of those splendid men I had met in
France and of the girls who poured tea for the King of the Belgians.
I wondered if any one back home was “just nodding” to them.

Everywhere was the blatant show of new wealth.

New money always glitters.  I saw it in cars with aluminum hoods and
gold fittings, diamonds big as birds’ eggs, ermine coats in the
daytime--jeweled heels at night.

Bad breeding plus new money shouted from every street corner.  At
private dinners, I ate foods that I knew were served merely because they
were expensive, glutton feasts with twice as much as any one could eat
with comfort.

One day I went to market--the kind of a market to which my mother would
have gone--and I saw women whose husbands labored hard, scorning to buy
any but porterhouse steaks--merely because porterhouse steak stood for
prosperity.

In Washington I met a new kind of American, a type that has sprung up
suddenly like an evil toadstool.  It is a fungous disease that spreads.
Some hangs from old American stock, some dangles from recent plantings,
all of it is snobbish and offensive.  It wears foreign clothes and
affects foreign ways, sometimes even foreign accents.  It chops and
mumbles its words like English servants who speak their language badly.
Some of this is acquired at fashionable finishing schools or from
foreign secretaries and servants.  These new Americans try to appear
superior and distinctive by scorning all things American.  They want
English chintzes in their homes, French brocades and Italian silks and
do not even know that some of these very textiles from America have won
prizes in Europe since 1912.  An American manufacturer told me he has to
stamp his cretonne “English style print” to sell it in this country.


This new species of American apes royalty.  It goes in for crests.  It
may have made its money in gum shoes or chewing tobacco, but it hires a
genealogist to dig up a shield.  Fine, if you are entitled to a crest.
But fake genealogists will cook up a coat for the price.

There are crests on the motor-cars, crests on the stationery, on the
silver, the toilet articles--there are sometimes even crests on the
servants’ buttons and on linen and underclothes!

Fake crests are the first step down, and like all lies they lead to
other lies.  The next step is ancestors.

Selling and painting ancestors is another business which thrives around
New York, Philadelphia, and Washington.  And the public swallows it.
They swallow each other’s ancestors.  Even old families take these new
descendants as a matter of course.

One of these new Americans recently gave a large feast in Washington
with every out-of-season delicacy in profusion.  The only simple thing
in the house was the mind of the hostess.  That night it was a tangled
skein.

I saw she was worried.  Her house was full of potentates, the wives of
two cabinet officers, and Mrs. Coolidge.  She left the room twice after
the dinner hour had arrived, and it was late when dinner was finally
announced.

Later in the evening one of the servants whispered to the hostess that
she was wanted on the telephone--the State Department.

She returned to the drawing-room looking as if she had just heard of a
death in the family.  The guests began considerately to leave.

Her expensive party was a dismal failure.  As I have known her husband
for years, I asked if I could be of any use.

[Illustration: p104.jpg HER EXPENSIVE PARTY WAS A DISMAL FAILURE]

“It ‘s too late, now,” he said.  “She had the Princess Bibesco and the
Princess Lubomirska here and the wife of the Vice President, and she
didn’t know the precedence they took.  She held up dinner half an hour
trying to get the State Department and now they tell her she guessed
wrong.  It ‘s a tragedy to her.”

I confess I did not feel very sorry for that woman.  I remembered my
little Indiana girl who introduced the captain to the Queen of Belgium.

I began to feel as if all America were like the De Morgan jingle:

                   “Great fleas have little fleas
                    On their backs to bite ‘em,
                    And little fleas have lesser fleas
                    And so ad infinitum.”

Then I took a trip across the continent, stopping off in Indiana to see
my little Y friends.  It was like a bath for my soul.  Brains count out
West.  Anybody who tries to show off is snubbed.

You must do something to be anything in the Middle West; just to have
something doesn’t count.  You don’t list your ancestors as you must in
Virginia or the Carolinas, but to feel self-respecting you must do
something.

I was happy to renew my wartime friendships.  Those who have not shared
a great work or a greater tragedy will not understand these bonds.

The same young friend who served tea to the king took me to a musicale.
She wore her war medal.  One of the guests, a lady from Virginia who
claims four coats of arms, was impressed by the girl’s medal and the
fact that she had entertained the king.

The girl had married since the war, a fine young Irish lawyer, with a
family name which once belonged to a king but which, since hard times
hit the old sod, has been a butt for song and jest.

The name did not impress the lady from Virginia.  “You have such an
interesting face,” she said.  “What was your name before your marriage?”

“Oh, it was much less interesting than my husband’s,” answered my young
Y friend, and lifting the conversation out of the personal she asked,
“Have you read Mr. Keynes’ ‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace?’”

“I had n’t read it myself,” she confided to me later, “but it was the
first new book I could think of!”

That is good American manners and what the French call savoir faire.

The Far West still keeps the American inheritance of open hearted
hospitality and its provincialism.  The West has inherited some of the
finest virtues of our country, and if it is not bitten by Back Bay,
Philadelphia, Virginia, or Charleston, it will grow up into its mother’s
finest child.

“No church west of Chicago, no God west of Denver,” we used to hear when
I was a child.  But to-day, the churches are part of the community and
even men go.  People in the West do not seem to go to church merely out
of respect for the devil and a conscience complex, but because they like
to.  Churches and schools are important places in the West.

President Harding has said that he hopes more and more people will learn
to want to pray in a closet alone with God.  There are many people like
that in our Middle West.  I say this, because I hope it may help other
American women who love their country to fight for honesty and purpose
in our national life, and for tolerance and respect for the simple
things in our private lives.