for thirty-two hundred years. I am confident she did not believe me, but
her "Indeed!" was delightful. In fact, I assure you I have lost my heart
to these American women. I met representatives of the Adams, Dana,
Madison, Lee, and other families identified with American history in a
most honorable way.

The continuity of the Four Hundred idea as a logical system was broken
by the quality of some of its members. Compared to the society I have
previously mentioned it was as chaff. There was a total lack of
intellectuality. Degeneracy marked some of their acts; divorce blackened
their records, and shameless affairs marked them. In this "set," and
particularly its imitators throughout the United States, the divorce
rate is appalling. Men leave their wives and obtain a divorce for no
other reason than that a woman falls in love with another woman's
husband. On a yacht we will say there is some scandal. A divorce ensues,
and afterward the parties are remarried. Or we will say a wife succumbs
to the blandishments of another man. The conjugal arrangements are
rearranged, so that, as a very merry New York club man told me, "It is
difficult to tell where you are at." In a word, the morale of the men of
this set is low, their standard high, but not always lived up to. I
believe that I am not doing the American of the middle class wrong and
the ultra-fashionable class an injustice in saying that it is as a class
immoral.

Americans make great parade of their churches. Spires rise like the
pikes of an army in every town, yet the morality of the men is low.
There are in this land 600,000 prostitutes--ruined women. But this is
not due entirely to the Four Hundred, whose irregularities appear to be
confined to inroads upon their own set. Nearly all these men are club
men; two-thirds are in business as brokers, bankers, or professional
men; and there is a large percentage of men of leisure and vast wealth.
They affect English methods, and are, as a rule, not highly intelligent,
but _blase_, often effeminate, an interesting spectacle to the student,
showing that the downfall of the American Republic would come sooner
than that of Rome if the "fast set" were a dominating force, which it is
not.

In the great middle class of the American men I find much to admire;
half educated, despite their boasted school system, they put up, to
quote one of them, "a splendid bluff" of respectability and morality,
yet their statistics give the lie to