to go home again, as sufficient proof that we had
nothing to fear from the spread of plutocratic ideals
among us. I assured her, and this she easily
imagined, that, the better known these became, the
worse they appeared to us; and that the only concern
our priors felt, in regard to them, was that our youth
could not conceive of them in their enormity, but,
in seeing how estimable plutocratic people often were,
they would attribute to their conditions the inherent
good of human nature. I said our own life was
so directly reasoned from its economic premises that
they could hardly believe the plutocratic life was
often an absolute non sequitur of the plutocratic
premises. I confessed that this error was at
the bottom of my own wish to visit America and study
those premises.
“And what has your conclusion been?” she
said, leaning eagerly towards me, across the table
between us, laden with the maps and charts we had
been examining for the verification of the position
of Altruria, and my own course here, by way of England.
A slight sigh escaped Mrs. Gray, which I interpreted
as an expression of fatigue; it was already past twelve
o’clock, and I made it the pretext for escape.
“You have seen the meaning and purport of Altruria
so clearly,” I said, “that I think I can
safely leave you to guess the answer to that question.”
She laughed, and did not try to detain me now when
I offered my hand for good-night. I fancied her
mother took leave of me coldly, and with a certain
effect of inculpation.
It is long since I wrote you, and you have had reason
enough to be impatient of my silence. I submit
to the reproaches of your letter, with a due sense
of my blame; whether I am altogether to blame, you
shall say after you have read this.
I cannot yet decide whether I have lost a great happiness,
the greatest that could come to any man, or escaped
the worst misfortune that could befall me. But,
such as it is, I will try to set the fact honestly
down.
I do not know whether you had any conjecture, from
my repeated mention of a lady whose character greatly
interested me, that I was in the way of feeling any
other interest in her than my letters expressed.
I am no longer young, though at thirty-five an Altrurian
is by no means so old as an American at the same age.
The romantic ideals of the American women which I
had formed from the American novels had been dissipated;
if I had any sentiment towards them, as a type, it
was one of distrust, which my very sense of the charm
in their inconsequence, their beauty, their brilliancy,
served rather to intensify. I thought myself doubly
defended by that difference between their civilization
and ours which forbade reasonable hope of happiness
in any sentiment for them tenderer than that of the
student of strange effects in human nature. But
we have not yet, my dear Cyril, reasoned the passions,
even in Altruria.
