. Our Philadelphia. part of the whole sad transformation. It ratherlikes the world outside to know what it is doing and, worse,it takes that world as its model. Its aim apparently is toshow that it can be as like every other town as two peas,so that, drinking tea to music at the Bellevue, dancing atthe Ritz, lunching and dining and playing golf and poloat the Country Clubs, the visitor can comfortably for-get he is not at home but in Philadelphia. The youthof Philadelphia have become eager to desert the EpiscopalAcademy and the University for Groton or St. Pauls,Llarvard or Yale, in order that
. Our Philadelphia. part of the whole sad transformation. It ratherlikes the world outside to know what it is doing and, worse,it takes that world as its model. Its aim apparently is toshow that it can be as like every other town as two peas,so that, drinking tea to music at the Bellevue, dancing atthe Ritz, lunching and dining and playing golf and poloat the Country Clubs, the visitor can comfortably for-get he is not at home but in Philadelphia. The youthof Philadelphia have become eager to desert the EpiscopalAcademy and the University for Groton or St. Pauls,Llarvard or Yale, in order that they may be trained to benot Philadelphians but, as they imagine, men of the world,forgetting the distinction there has hitherto been in beingplain Philadelphians. At the moment when in far oldertowns of Europe people are striving to recover theircharacter by reviving local costumes, language, and cus-toms, Philadelphians are deliberately throwing theirs away*with their old traditions. The Assembly is one of their. BED ROOM, STENTON THE HOME OF JAMES LOGAN THE SOCIAL ADVENTURE: THE ASSEMBLY 165 few rare possessions left, and strict as they are with it inone way, in another they are playing fast and loose withit, holding it, as if it were a mere modern dance, at afashionable hotel, II If I now regret, as I do, never having gone to theAssembly, it is because of all that it represents, all thatmakes it a classic. But at the time, my regret, though askeen, was because of more personal reasons. I could haveborne the historic side of my loss with equanimity, it wasthe social side of it that broke my heart. I have had manybad quarters of an hour in my life, but few as poignant asthat which followed the appearance at our front door ofthe coloured man who distributed the cards for the As-sembly—far too precious to be trusted to the post—andwho came to leave one for my Brother. It was an injusticethat oppressed me with a sense of my wrongs as a womanand might have set me window-smas
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