Page:Traveler from Altruria, Howells, 1894.djvu/175

Rh "I should be perfectly delighted!" said Mrs. Makely, [sic]and I should receive them with the greatest possible cordiality."

"The same kind of cordiality that you would show to the cottagers?"

"I suppose that I should feel that I had more in common with the cottagers. We should be interested in the same things, and we should probably know the same people and have more to talk about"—

"You would both belong to the same class, and that tells the whole story. If you were out west, and the owner of one of those big, twenty thousand acre farms called on you with his wife, would you act toward them as you would toward our natives? You wouldn't! You would all be rich people together, and you would understand each other because you had money."

"Now, that is not so," Mrs. Makely interrupted. "There are plenty of rich people one wouldn't wish to know at all, and who really can't get into society; who are ignorant and vulgar. And then when you come to money, I don't see but what country people are as glad to get it as anybody."

"Oh, gladder," said the young man.