some other Americans. But these exceptions only accented the absolutely
English dominance of the spectacle. The alien elements were less evident
in the observed than in the observers, where, beyond the barrier, which
there was nothing to prevent their passing, they sat in passive rows, in
passive pairs, in passive ones, and stared and stared. The observers
were mostly men, and largely men of the age when the hands folded on the
top of the stick express a pause in the emotions and the energies which
has its pathos. There were women among them, of course, but the women
were also of the age when the keener sensibilities are taking a rest;
and such aliens of their sex as qualified the purely English nature of
the affair lost whatever was aggressive in their difference.

[Illustration: THE CARRIAGES DRAWN UP BESIDE THE SACRED CLOSE]

It was necessary to the transaction of the drama that from time to time
the agents of the penny-chair company should go about in the close and
collect money for the chairs; and it became a question, never rightly
solved, how the ladies who had come unattended managed, with their
pocketless dresses, to carry coins unequalled in bulk since the iron
currency of Sparta; or whether they held the pennies frankly in their
hands till they paid them away. In England the situation, if it is
really the situation, is always accepted with implicit confidence, and
if it had been the custom to bring pennies in their hands, these ladies
would have no more minded doing it than they minded being looked at by
people whose gaze dedicated them to an inviolate superiority.

With us the public affirmation of class, if it were imaginable, could
not be imaginable except upon the terms of a mutinous protest in the
spectators which would not have been less real for being silent. But
again I say the thing would not have been possible with us in New York;