indefinitely in some cases, and actually live at the club. The club,
however, is known only to the cities and larger towns, in this highly
developed form; to the ordinary, simple American of the country, or of
the country town of five or ten thousand people, a New York club would be
as strange as it would be to any Altrurian.

"Do many of the husbands left behind in the summer live at the club?" I
asked.

"All that _have_ a club do," he said. "Often there's a very good
table d'hote dinner that you couldn't begin to get for the same price
anywhere else; and there are a lot of good fellows there, and you can
come pretty near forgetting that you're homeless, or even that you're
married."

He laughed, and his wife said: "You ought to be ashamed, Dick; and me
worrying about you all the time I'm away, and wondering what the cook
gives you here. Yes," she continued, addressing me, "that's the worst
thing about the clubs. They make the men so comfortable that they say
it's one of the principal obstacles to early marriages. The young men try
to get lodgings near them, so that they can take their meals there, and
they know they get much better things to eat than they could have in a
house of their own at a great deal more expense, and so they simply don't
think of getting married. Of course," she said, with that wonderful,
unintentional, or at least unconscious, frankness of hers, "I don't blame
the clubs altogether. There's no use denying that girls are expensively
brought up, and that a young man has to think twice before taking one of
them out of the kind of home she's used to and putting her into the kind
of home he can give her. If the clubs have killed early marriages,
the women have created the clubs."