I'd give a forty-dollar dog to
be good and cold and freeze my nose. Why, Doctor Gorgas has made
us so sanitary that we can't even get sick. I'd hail an epidemic
as a friend.
"It's even harder on the women folks, for they can't find anything
to kick about, so they fuss with one another and with us. They
have clubs, you know, to improve things, but there's nothing to
improve. We had a social war recently over a button. One clique
wanted a club emblem that would cost a dollar and a half, while
the other faction were in favor of a dollar button. I tell you, it
was serious. Then, too, we're all tagged and labelled like cans of
salmon with the price-mark on--we can't four-flush. You can tell a
man's salary by the number of rocking-chairs in his house, and the
wife of a fellow who draws eighteen hundred a year can't associate
with a woman whose husband makes twenty-five hundred. They are
very careful about such things. We go to the same dances on the
same dates, we dance with the same people to the same tunes by the
same band, and when we get off in some corner of the same veranda
in search of the same old breeze, which we know is blowing at
precisely the same velocity from the usual quarter, our partners
tell us that Colonel So-and-So laid four hundred twenty-seven more
cubic yards of concrete this week than last, or that Steam Shovel
Number Twenty-three broke the record again by eighty yards.
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