"My dear, a girl knows beyond all the arts of hoodwinking whether
she's having a good time, and your little scheme of passing off one
of those hotel hops for a festivity would never work in the world."

"Well, I think it is too bad! What has become of all the easy
gaiety there used to be in the world?"

"It has been starched and ironed out of it, apparently. Saratoga is
still trying to do the good old American act, with its big hotels
and its heterogeneous hops, and I don't suppose there's ever such a
thing as a society person at any of them. That wouldn't be so bad.
But the unsociety people seem to be afraid of one another. They
feel that there is something in the air--something they don't and
can't understand; something alien, that judges their old-fashioned
American impulse to be sociable, and contemns it. No; we can't do
anything for our hapless friends--I can hardly call them our
acquaintances. We must avoid them, and keep them merely as a
pensive colour in our own vivid memories of Saratoga. If we made
them have a good time, and sent them on their way rejoicing, I
confess that I should feel myself distinctly a loser. As it is,
they're a strain of melancholy poetry in my life, of music in the
minor key. I shall always associate their pathos with this hot
summer weather, and I shall think of them whenever the thermometer
registers eighty-nine. Don't you see the advantage of that? I
believe I can ultimately get some literature out of them. If I can
think of a fitting fable for them Fulkerson will feature it in Every
Other Week. He'll get out a Saratoga number, and come up here and
strike the hotels and springs for ad's."

"Well," said Mrs. March, "I wish I had never seen them; and it's all