Page:Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son.djvu/280

Rh I want to caution you right here against getting the society bug in your head. I'd sooner you'd smoke these Turkish cigarettes which smell like a fire in the fertilizer factory. You're going to meet a good many stray fools in the course of business every day without going out to hunt up the main herd after dark.

Everybody over here in Europe thinks that we haven't any society in America, and a power of people in New York think that we haven't any society in Chicago. But so far as I can see there are just as many ninety-nine-cent men spending million-dollar incomes in one place as another; and the rules that govern the game seem to be the same in all three places—you've got to be a descendant to belong, and the farther you descend the harder you belong. The only difference is that, in Europe, the ancestor who made money enough so that his family could descend, has been dead so long that they have forgotten his shop; in New York