IV.

My friend did not quite like to think.  Vague, reproachful thoughts for all the remote and immediate luxury of his life passed through his mind.  If he reformed that and gave the saving to hunger and cold?  But what was the use?  There was so much hunger, so much cold, that it could not go round.

The cabman was obeying his orders too faithfully.  He was not only walking by the Broadway coffle, he was creeping by.  His action caught the notice of the slaves, and as the coups passed them they all turned and faced it, like soldiers under review making ready to salute a superior.  They were perfectly silent, perfectly respectful, but their eyes seemed to pierce the coupe through and through.

My friend was suddenly aware of a certain quality of representivity; he stood to these men for all the ease and safety that they could never, never hope to know.  He was Society:  Society that was to be preserved because it embodies Civilization.  He wondered if they hated him in his capacity of Better Classes.  He no longer thought of getting out and watching their behavior as they took their bread and coffee.  He would have liked to excuse that thought, and protest that he was ashamed of it; that he was their friend, and wished them well—­as well as might be without the sacrifice of his own advantages or superfluities, which he could have persuaded them would be perfectly useless.  He put his hand on that of his companion trembling on his arm with sympathy, or at least with intelligence.

“You mustn’t mind.  What we are and what we do is all right.  It’s what they are and what they suffer that’s all wrong.”

V.

“Does that view of the situation still satisfy you?” I asked, when he had told me of this singular experience; I liked his apparently not coloring it at all.

“I don’t know,” he answered.  “It seems to be the only way out.”

“Well, it’s an easy way,” I admitted, “and it’s an idea that ought to gratify the midnight platoon.”

THE BEACH AT ROCKAWAY

I confess that I cannot hear people rejoice in their summer sojourn as beyond the reach of excursionists without a certain rebellion; and yet I have to confess also that after spending a Sunday afternoon of late July, four or five years ago, with the excursionists at one of the beaches near New York, I was rather glad that my own summer sojourn was not within reach of them.  I know very well that the excursionists must go somewhere, and as a man and a brother I am willing they should go anywhere, but as a friend of quiet and seclusion I should be sorry to have them come much where I am.  It is not because I would deny them a share of any pleasure I enjoy, but because they are so many and I am so few that I think they would get all the pleasure and I none.  I hope the reader will see how this attitude distinguishes me from the selfish people who inhumanly exult in their remoteness from excursionists.