And it is always a "party"--everyone is
conscious they are there, and they either assume bad manners or good ones,
but nobody is sans gene. Octavia says it takes as long to be that as to
look like a gentleman clean shaven in evening dress. The rooms are awfully
hot, steam heated up to about 75, and it makes your head swim after a
while. There is only the son and a married daughter and husband in the
house besides ourselves and two young men. We should call them bank clerks
at home, and that is, I suppose, what they are here; only it is all
different. Every man works just like our middle classes; it is not the
least unaristocratic to be a lawyer or a doctor or a wholesale
store-keeper, or any profession you can name, so long as it makes you rich.
A man who does nothing is not considered to "amount to anything," and he
generally doesn't, either! And I suppose it must be the climate, because
directly they get immensely rich, so that the sons need not work, when it
gets to the third generation, they often are invalids or weaklings, or have
some funny vice or mania, and lots of them die of drink; which shows it is
intended in some climates for men to work. Octavia says it takes centuries
of wielding battle-axes and commanding vassals to give the consciousness of
superiority which enables people to be idle without being vicious; but Tom
says it is because they don't hunt and shoot, and go to the bench, and
attend to their estates and county business; so instead they have to go
crazy over fast motoring or flying machines, or any fad which is uppermost,
not having any traditions of how their forefathers passed their time.
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