lso be interested in precisely the right sports, theatrical
shows and opera singers, show the right political credulities and
indignations, and have some sort of connection with the right church.
Nearly always, because of the apeing of English custom that prevails
everywhere in America, it must be the so-called Protestant Episcopal
Church, a sort of outhouse of the Church of England, with ecclesiastics
who imitate the English sacerdotal manner much as small boys imitate the
manner of eminent baseball players. Every fashionable Protestant
Episcopal congregation in the land is full of ex-Baptists and
ex-Methodists who have shed Calvinism, total immersion and the
hallelujah hymns on their way up the ladder. The same impulse leads the
Jews, whenever the possibility of invading the citadel of the Christians
begins to bemuse them (as happened during the late war, for example,
when patriotism temporarily adjourned the usual taboos), to embrace
Christian Science--as a sort of halfway station, so to speak, more
medical than Christian, and hence secure against ordinary derisions. And
it is an impulse but little different which lies at the bottom of the
much-discussed title-hunt.

A title, however paltry, is of genuine social value, more especially in
America; it represents a status that cannot be changed overnight by the
rise of rivals, or by personal dereliction, or by mere accident. It is a
policy of insurance against dangers that are not to be countered as
effectively in any other manner. Miss G----, the daughter of an
enormously wealthy scoundrel, may be accepted everywhere, but all the
while she is insecure. Her father may lose his fortune tomorrow, or be
jailed by newspaper outcry, or marry a prostitute and so commit social
suicide himself and murder his daughter, or she herself may fall a
victim to some rival's superior machinations, or stoop to fornication of
some forbidden variety, or otherwise get herself under the ban. But once
she is a duchess, she is safe. No catastrophe short of divorce can take
away her coronet, and even divorce will leave the purple marks of it
upon her brow. Most valuable boon of all, she is now free to be
herself,--a rare, rare experience for an American. She may, if she
likes, go about in a Mother Hubbard, or join the Seventh Day Adventists,
or declare for the Bolsheviki, or wash her own lingerie, or have her
hair bobbed, and still she will remain a duchess, and, as a duchess,
irremovably super