s trying to fit everything with a
phrase, said it was the unfrequenters who were fashionable. There was
great ease there, and simplicity; and if there was not distinction, it
was not for want of distinguished people, but because there seems to be
some solvent in New York life that reduces all men to a common level,
that touches everybody with its potent magic and brings to the surface
the deeply underlying nobody. The effect for some temperaments, for
consciousness, for egotism, is admirable; for curiosity, for hero
worship, it is rather baffling. It is the spirit of the street
transferred to the drawing-room; indiscriminating, levelling, but
doubtless finally wholesome, and witnessing the immensity of the place,
if not consenting to the grandeur of reputations or presences.

Beaton now denied that this house represented a salon at all, in the old
sense; and he held that the salon was impossible, even undesirable, with
us, when Miss Vance sighed for it. At any rate, he said that this turmoil
of coming and going, this bubble and babble, this cackling and hissing of
conversation was not the expression of any such civilization as had
created the salon. Here, he owned, were the elements of intellectual
delightfulness, but he said their assemblage in such quantity alone
denied the salon; there was too much of a good thing. The French word
implied a long evening of general talk among the guests, crowned with a
little chicken at supper, ending at cock-crow. Here was tea, with milk or
with lemon-baths of it and claret-cup for the hardier spirits throughout
the evening. It was very nice, very pleasant, but it was not the little
chicken--not the salon. In fact, he affirmed, the salon descended from
above, out of the great world, and included the aesthetic world in it.
But our great world--the rich people, were stupid, with no wish to be
otherwise; they were not even curious about authors and artists. Beaton
fancied himself speaking impartially, and so he allowed himself to speak
bitterly; he said that in no other city in the world, except Vienna,
perhaps, were such people so little a part of society.

"It isn't altogether the rich people's fault," said Margaret; and she
spoke impartially, too. "I don't believe that the literary men and the
artists would like a salon that descended to them. Madame Geoffrin, you
know, was very plebeian; her husband was a business man of some sort."

"He would have been a howling swell in New York,