American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home'. Julian Street
the door had begun to swing immediately upon my saying the word "ghosts."
The appropriateness of the coincidence was striking. I turned quickly to my friends, who were in conversation behind me, and asked:
"Speaking of ghosts—did you see that door open?"
It is my recollection that none of them had seen it. Certainly not more than one of them had, for I remember my feeling of disappointment that any one present should have missed so strange a circumstance. Some one may have asked what I had seen; at all events I was full of the idea, and, indicating the open door, I began to tell what I had seen, when—exactly as though the thing were done deliberately to circumstantiate my story—with the slow, steady movement of a heavy door pushed by a feeble hand, the other portal of the huge cabinet swung open.
This time all four of us were looking.
Presently, as we moved across the wide hall to go downstairs again, Bryan came from one of the other chambers, whither, I think, he had carried the young lady's supper on a tray.
"Are there supposed to be any ghosts in this house?" I asked him.
Bryan showed his white teeth in the semi-darkness. Whether he believed in ghosts or not, evidently he did not fear them.
"Yes, sir," he said. "We're supposed to have a ghost here."
"Where?"
"In that room over there," he answered, indicating the bedroom from which we had come.
We listened attentively to Bryan while he told how the daughter of Governor Swan had come to attend a ball at Hampton, and how she had died in the four-post bed in that old shadowy guest room, and of how, since then, she had been seen from time to time.
"They's several people say they saw her," he finished. "She comes out and combs her hair in front of the long mirror."
However, as we drove back to Baltimore that evening, we repeatedly assured one another that we did not believe in ghosts.
CHAPTER IX
ARE WE STANDARDIZED?
Almost all modern European critics of the United States agree in complaining that our telephones and sleeping cars are objectionable, and that we are "standardized" in everything. Their criticism of the telephone seems to be that the state of perfection to which it has been brought in this country causes it to be widely used, while their disapproval of our sleeping cars is invariably based on the assumption that they have no compartments—which is not the fact, since most of the great transcontinental railroads do run compartment cars, and much better ones than the best wagons lits, and since, also, all our sleeping cars have drawing-rooms which are incomparably better than the most comfortable European compartments.
The charge of standardization will, however, bear a little thought. It is true that most American cities have a general family resemblance—that a business street in Atlanta or Memphis looks much like a business street in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Buffalo, Milwaukee, St. Paul, Kansas City, or St. Louis—and that much the same thing may be said of residence streets. Houses and office buildings in one city are likely to resemble those of corresponding grade in another; the men who live in the houses and go daily to the offices are also similar; so are the trolley cars in which they journey to and fro; still more so the Fords which many of them use; the clothing of one man is like that of another, and all have similar conventions concerning the date at which—without regard to temperature—straw hats should be discarded. Their womenfolk, also, are more or less alike, as are the department stores in which they shop and the dresses they buy. And the same is true of their children, the costumes of those children, and the schools they attend.
Every American city has social groups corresponding to similar groups in other cities. There is always the small, affluent group, made up of people who keep butlers and several automobiles, and who travel extensively. In this group there are always some snobs: ladies who give much time to societies founded on ancestry, and have a Junkerish feeling about "social leadership."
Every city has also its "fast" group: people who consider themselves "unconventional," who drink more than is good for them, and make much noise. Some members of this group may belong to the first group, as well, but in the fast group they have a following of well-dressed hangers-on: unmarried men and women, youngish rather than young, who, with little money, yet manage to dress well and to be seen eating and drinking and dancing in public places. There is usually to be found in this group a hectic widow or two—be it grass or sod—and a few pretty girls who, having been given too much freedom at eighteen, begin to wonder at twenty-eight, why, though they have always been "good fellows," none of the dozens of men who take them about have married them. To this aggregation drift also those restless husbands and wives whose glances rove hopefully away from their mates, a few well-bred drunkards, and a few men and women who are trying to forget things they cannot forget.
Then there is always the young married group—a nice group for the most part—living in comfortable new houses or apartments, and keeping, usually, both a small automobile and a baby carriage. They also go to the Country Club on Saturday nights, leave their motors standing in the drive, eat a lukewarm supper that tastes like papier-mâché, and dance themselves to wiltedness.
Another group is entirely masculine, being made up of husbands of various ages, their mutual bond being the downtown club to which they go daily, and in which the subjects discussed are politics, golf, and the evils of prohibition. To this group always belong the black-sheep husbands who, after taking their wives to the Country Club, disappear and remain away until they are sent for because it is time to go home, when they come back shamefaced and scented with Scotch.
Every American city has also what Don Marquis calls its "little group of serious thinkers"—women, most of them—possessed of an ardent desire to "keep abreast of the times." These women belong to clubs and literary societies which are more serious than war. They are always reading papers or attending lectures, and at these lectures they get a strange assortment of "cultural" information and misinformation, delivered with ghastly assurance by heterogeneous gentlemen in cutaway coats, who go about and spout for pay. If you meet these ladies, and they suspect you of being infested by the germs of "culture," they will open fire on you with a "thought," about which you may detect a curious ghostly fragrance, as of Alfred Noyes's lecture, last week, or of "the New Republic" or the "Literary Digest." The most "liberal" of them may even take "The Masses," precisely as people rather like them used to take "The Philistine," a generation or two ago. Among the members of this group are the women who work violently for suffrage—something in which I personally believe, but which, merely because I believe in it, I do not necessarily like to take in my coffee as a substitute for sugar, on my bread as a substitute for butter, and in my ear as a substitute for pleasant general conversation.
I do not wish to seem to speak disparagingly of women of this type, for they are doing good, and they will do more good when they have become more accustomed to possessing minds. Having but recently discovered their minds, they are playing with them enthusiastically, like children who have just discovered their new toys on Christmas morning. It is delightful to watch them. It is diverting to have them pop ideas at you with that bright-eyed, efficient, assertive look which seems to say: "See! I am a liberal woman—a woman of the new type. I meet men on their own ground. Do you wish to talk of birth control, social hygiene, and sex attraction? Or shall we reverse the order? Or shall I show you how much I know about Brieux, and household economics, and Ellen Key, and eugenics, and George Meredith, and post-impressionism, and "Roberts' Rules of Order," and theosophy, and conditions in the Sixteenth