Until this minute it was the very element in American life she had found
most distasteful. Her inclinations, carefully fostered by her parents,
had always been for the solid, the well-ordered, the assured, evolved
from precedent to precedent till its conventions were fixed and its
doings regulated as by a code of etiquette. Now, all of a sudden, she
perceived that life in shirt-sleeves possessed certain advantages over a
well-bred existence in full dress. It allowed the strictly human
qualities an easier sort of play. Where there was no pretense at turning
to the world a smooth, impeccable social front, toil and suffering,
misfortune and disgrace, became things to be less ashamed of.
Practically every one in these unpretentious, tree-shaded houses knew
what it was to struggle upward, with many a slip backward in the process
and sometimes a crashing fall from the top. These accidents were
understood. The result was the creation of a living atmosphere, not
perhaps highly civilized, but highly sympathetic, charged with the
comprehension of human frailty, into which one could carry one's
dishonor, not wholly with equanimity, but at least with the knowledge
that such burdens were not objects for astonishment.
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