That to read of the
amusements and home life of a clique of people with whom they have
little in common, whose whole education and point of view are
different from their own, and whom they have rarely seen and never
expect to meet, should afford the average citizen any amusement
seems little short of impossible.
One accepts as a natural sequence that abroad (where an hereditary
nobility have ruled for centuries, and accustomed the people to
look up to them as the visible embodiment of all that is splendid
and unattainable in life) such interest should exist. That the
home-coming of an English or French nobleman to his estates should
excite the enthusiasm of hundreds more or less dependent upon him
for their amusement or more material advantages; that his marriage
to an heiress - meaning to them the re-opening of a long-closed
CHATEAU and the beginning of a period of prosperity for the
district - should excite his neighbors is not to be wondered at.
It is well known that whole regions have been made prosperous by
the residence of a court, witness the wealth and trade brought into
Scotland by the Queen's preference for "the Land of Cakes," and the
discontent and poverty in Ireland from absenteeism and persistent
avoidance of that country by the court. But in this land, where
every reason for interesting one class in another seems lacking,
that thousands of well-to-do people (half the time not born in this
hemisphere), should delightedly devour columns of incorrect
information about New York dances and Lenox house-parties, winter
cruises, or Newport coaching parades, strikes the observer as the
"unexpected" in its purest form.
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