Page:Traveler from Altruria, Howells, 1894.djvu/127

Rh be richer than all the other Americans put together. Such a status, growing out of our political equality and our material prosperity must evince a divine purpose to any one intimate with the designs of providence, and it seemed a kind of impiety to doubt its perfection. I excused the misgivings, which I could not help seeing in the Altrurian to his alien traditions, and I was aware that my friends had done so, too. But if I could judge from myself he must have left them all sensible of their effort; and this was not pleasant. I could not blink the fact that although I had openly disagreed with him on every point of ethics and economics, I was still responsible for him as a guest. It was as if an English gentleman had introduced a blatant American democrat into tory society; or, rather, as if a southerner of the olden time had harbored a northern abolitionist, and permitted him to inquire into the workings of slavery among his neighbors. People would tolerate him as my guest for a time, but there must be an end of their patience with the tacit enmity of his sentiments, and the explicit vulgarity of his ideals, and when the end came, I must be attainted with him.

I did not like the notion of this, and I meant to