difficult for the others. In fact every society is repellant of strangers
in the degree that it is sufficient to itself, and is incurious
concerning the rest of the world. If it has not the elements of
self-satisfaction in it, if it is uninformed and new and restless, it is
more hospitable than an older society which has a sense of merit founded
upon historical documents, and need no longer go out of itself for
comparisons of any sort, knowing that if it seeks anything better it will
probably be disappointed. The natural man, the savage, is as indifferent
to others as the exclusive, and those who accuse the coldness of the
Bostonians, and their reluctant or repellant behaviour toward unknown
people, accuse not only civilisation, but nature itself.

That love of independence which is notable in us even in our most
acquiescent phases at home is perhaps what brings these cultivated and
agreeable people so far away, where they can achieve a sort of sylvan
urbanity without responsibility, and without that measuring of purses
which attends the summer display elsewhere. At Campobello one might be
poor with almost as little shame as in Cambridge if one were cultivated.
Mrs. Pasmer, who seldom failed of doing just the right thing for herself,
had promptly divined the advantages of Campobello for her family. She
knew, by dint of a little inquiry, and from the volunteer information of
enthusiasts who had been there the summer before, just who was likely to
be there during the summer with which she now found herself confronted.
Campobello being yet a new thing, it was not open to the objection that
you were sure to meet such and such people, more or less common or
disagreeable, there; whatever happened, it could be lightly handled in
the retrospect as the adventure of a partial and fragmentary summer when
really she hardly cared where they went.

They did not get away from Boston before the middle of July, and after