Yes, I’ve sometimes taken that view of it.  And yet if you ask a stranger to your house, you establish a tacit understanding with him that you won’t forget him after you have him there.  I like to go about and note the mystification of strangers who’ve come here with some notion of a little attention.  It’s delightfully poignant; I suffer with them; it’s a cheap luxury of woe; I follow them through all the turns and windings of their experience.  Of course the theory is that, being turned loose here with the rest, they may speak to anybody; but the fact is, they can’t.  Sometimes I should like to hail some of these unfriended spirits, but I haven’t the courage.  I’m not individually bashful, but I have a thousand years of Anglo-Saxon civilisation behind me.  There ought to be policemen, to show strangers about and be kind to them.  I’ve just seen two pretty women cast away in a corner, and clinging to a small water-colour on the wall with a show of interest that would melt a heart of stone.  Why do you come, Mrs. Brinkley?  I should like to know.  You’re not obliged to.”

“No,” said Mrs. Brinkley, lowering her voice instinctively, as if to bring his down.  “I suppose I come from force of habit I’ve been coming a long time, you know.  Why do you come?”

“Because I can’t sleep.  If I could sleep, I should be at home in bed.”  A weariness came into his thin face and dim eyes that was pathetic, and passed into a whimsical sarcasm.  “I’m not one of the great leisure class, you know, that voluntarily turns night into day.  Do you know what I go about saying now?”

“Something amusing, I suppose.”

“You’d better not be so sure of that.  I’ve discovered a fact, or rather I’ve formulated an old one.  I’ve always been troubled how to classify people here, there are so many exceptions; and I’ve ended by broadly generalising them as women and men.”

Mrs. Brinkley was certainly amused at this.  “It seems to me that there you’ve been anticipated by nature—­not to mention art.”

“Oh, not in my particular view.  The women in America represent the aristocracy which exists everywhere else in both sexes.  You are born to the patrician leisure; you have the accomplishments and the clothes and manners and ideals; and we men are a natural commonalty, born to business, to newspapers, to cigars, and horses.  This natural female aristocracy of ours establishes the forms, usages, places, and times of society.  The epicene aristocracies of other countries turn night into day in their social pleasures, and our noblesse sympathetically follows their example.  You ladies, who can lie till noon next day, come to Jane’s reception at eleven o’clock, and you drag along with you a herd of us brokers, bankers, merchants, lawyers, and doctors, who must be at our offices and counting-rooms before nine in the morning.  The hours of us work-people are regulated by the wholesome industries of the great democracy which we’re a part of; and the hours of our wives and daughters by the deleterious pleasures of the Old World aristocracy.  That’s the reason we’re not all at home in bed.”