is world must finish. But the
end is not yet; one cannot help feeling sympathy for people who are
trying to live up to their traditions and be true to such immaterial
idols as "honor" and "family" in this discouragingly material age, when
everything goes down before the Golden Calf. Nor does one wonder that
men who can trace their ancestors back to the Crusades should hesitate to
ally themselves with the last rich _parvenu_ who has raised himself from
the gutter, or resent the ardor with which the latest importation of
American ambition tries to chum with them and push its way into their
life.

No. 31--Men's Manners

Nothing makes one feel so old as to wake up suddenly, as it were, and
realize that the conditions of life have changed, and that the standards
you knew and accepted in your youth have been raised or lowered. The
young men you meet have somehow become uncomfortably polite, offering you
armchairs in the club, and listening with a shade of deference to your
stories. They are of another generation; their ways are not your ways,
nor their ambitions those you had in younger days. One is tempted to
look a little closer, to analyze what the change is, in what this subtle
difference consists, which you feel between your past and their present.
You are surprised and a little angry to discover that, among other
things, young men have better manners than were general among the youths
of fifteen years ago.

Anyone over forty can remember three epochs in men's manners. When I was
a very young man, there were still going about in society a number of
gentlemen belonging to what was reverently called the "old school," who
had evidently taken Sir Charles Grandison as their model, read Lord
Chesterfield's letters to his son with attention, and been brought up to
commence letters to their fathers, "Honored Parent," signing themselves
"Your humble servant and respectful son." There are a few such old
gentlemen still to be found in the more conservative clubs, where certain
windows are tacitly abandoned to these elegant-mannered fossils. They
are quite harmless unless you happen to find them in a reminiscent mood,
when they are apt to be a little tiresome; it takes their rusty mental
machinery so long to get working! Washington possesses a particularly
fine collection among the retired army and navy officers and
ex-officials. It is a fact well known that no one drawing a pension ever
dies.

About 1875, a n