so well trained as the Swedes or the Irish. They still expect to be treated as one of the family. I suppose,” she continued, with a lingering ire in her voice, “that in Altruria you do treat them as one of the family?”
“We have no servants, in the American sense,” I answered, as inoffensively as I could.
Mrs. Makely irrelevantly returned to the question that had first provoked her indignation. “And I should like to know how much worse it is to have a back elevator for the servants than it is to have the basement door for the servants, as you always do when you live in a separate house?”
“I should think it was no worse,” I admitted, and I thought this a good chance to turn the talk from the dangerous channel it had taken. “I wish, Mrs. Makely, you would tell me something about the way people live in separate houses in New York.”
She was instantly pacified. “Why, I should be delighted. I only wish my friend Mrs. Bellington Strange was back from Europe; then I could show you a model house. I mean to take you there, as soon as she gets home. She's a kind of Altrurian herself, you know. She was my dearest friend at school, and it almost broke my heart when she married Mr. Strange, so much older, and her inferior in every way. But she's got his money now, and oh, the good she does do with it! I know you'll like each other, Mr. Homos. I do wish Eva was at home!”
I said that I should be very glad to meet an American Altrurian, but that now I wished she would tell me about the normal New York house, and what was its animating principle, beginning with the basement door.
She laughed and said, “Why, it's just like any other house!”
VII
I can never insist enough, my dear Cyril, upon the illogicality of American life. You know what the plutocratic principle is, and what the plutocratic civilization should logically be. But the plutocratic civilization is much better than it should logically be, bad as it is; for the personal equation constantly modifies it, and renders it far less dreadful than you would reasonably expect. That is, the potentialities of goodness implanted in the
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