Page:Our Philadelphia (Pennell, 1914).djvu/467

Rh its grave and tranquil walls, on its substantial leather-covered chairs, Stuart's Washington looking down from his place above the mantelpiece, they continue to feast with a luxury Lucullus might have envied. Fashion, however, drives the less wise to more frivolous scenes. I never thought to see the day when I should, in Philadelphia, lunch at a large, well-appointed, luxurious woman's club, when I should be invited to feast at the Union League—my lunch there was one of the most extraordinary of all my extraordinary experiences on my return to Philadelphia—when the cloth for my dinner would be laid in a big, gay, noisy, crowded Country Club—and yet the miracle had been worked in my absence and I saw not the day, but the many days when these things happened. Not only this. In Clubs and Country Clubs a degree of privacy is still assured. But it is a degree too much, to judge from the way Philadelphia rushes to lunch, and dine, and drink the tea it does not want at five o'clock, in hotels and restaurants: our little secluded oyster saloons exchanged for dazzling lunch counters, the Spruce and Pine and Walnut Street house that could not be except in Philadelphia deserted for the Ritz and the Bellevue that might be in New York or Chicago, Paris or London, Vienna or Rome. The old fashion was to celebrate the feast in cloistered seclusion, to let none intrude who was not bidden to share it. Now the fashion is to cry out and summon the mob and the multitude to gaze upon Philadelphia feasting. I know that this is in a measure the result of a change that is