ed sort of way without moving.

"Hello, yourself!" he remarked languidly. "It's good to see you, all
right--but why make so much damned fuss about it?"

The next sentence interchanged between the two developed the fact that
he was totally ignorant that his friend had been away at all. This is by
no means a fantastic illustration. It happens every day. That is one of
the joys of living in New York. You can get drunk, steal a million or
so, or run off with another man's wife--and no one will hear about it
until you are ready for something else. In such a community it is not
extraordinary that most people are taken at their face value. Life
moves at too rapid a pace to allow us to find out much about
anybody--even our friends. One asks other people to dinner simply
because one has seen them at somebody's else house.

I found it at first very difficult--in fact almost impossible--to spur
my wife on to a satisfactory cooperation with my efforts to make the
hand of friendship feed the mouth of business. She rather indignantly
refused to meet my chewing-gum client or call on his wife. She said she
preferred to keep her self-respect and stay in the boarding-house where
we had resided since we moved to the city; but I demonstrated to her by
much argument that it was worse than snobbish not to be decently polite
to one's business friends. It was not their fault if they were vulgar.
One might even help them to enlarge their lives. Gradually she came
round; and as soon as the old German had given me his business she was
the first to suggest moving to an apartment hotel uptown.

For a long time, however, she declined to make any genuine social
effort. She knew two or three women from our neighborhood who were
living in the city, and she used to go and sit with them in the
afternoons and sew and help take care of the children. She said they and
their husbands were good enough for her and that she had no aspirations
toward society. An evening at the theater--in the balcony--every two
weeks or so, and a rubber of whist on Saturday night, with a
chafing-dish supper afterward, was all the excitement she needed. That
was twenty-five years ago. To-day it is I who would put on the brakes,
while she insists on shoveling soft coal into the social furnace.

Her metamorphosis was gradual but complete. I imagine that her first
reluctance to essay an acquaintance with society arose out of
embarrassment and bashfulness. At any rate she no soon