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It seemed to him as though all his life he had naturally belonged to this perfect world of which country houses, city mansions, city and country clubs, expensive hotels and inns, cars, resorts, beautiful women, affected manners, subtlety of appreciation and perfection of appointment generally were the inherent concomitants.
His faith in it dates from his earliest infancy, and he resorts to its beneficent influence at least seven times a day, and drinks his last Krügl with apparently the same relish as the first. The quantity which Germans drink is something incredible. Bavarian students usually take from five to seven masses per day.
The Week-End holiday, as it is called, is greatly prized, and is recognized by the railroads in granting excursions at greatly reduced rates. There is always a heavy exodus of people from the city to the surrounding resorts during the summer and autumn months on Saturday afternoon and Sunday.
They were crossing Lombard, they were keeping straight on down Powell, probably for some of the North Beach resorts; but, as with voluble talk and laughter they passed the opposite curb, I noticed a singular thing one man who dropped out of the group silently as if unobserved by his companions.
Life in the most expensive hotels, an automobile by the month, gowns designed by the greatest modistes for his wife and daughter, summers at the most fashionable resorts, winter-skating in Switzerland, all these luxuries were for him but a kind of uniform of respectability that kept him in the world of the powerful, permitting him to enter everywhere.
He carefully avoided all his former resorts, and directed his steps to those parts of the town where poverty and vice were accustomed to assemble, strong in their numbers and their misery. Among them he now strove to bury his griefs and acquire consolation; but, alas, it was at the cost of every hope of virtue which might yet lurk in his nature!
There are plenty of other resorts, a good many of them under the sidewalks, where the dinner is almost as good but where a man doesn't take his wife. And up-stairs here and in a few others well, if a woman is seen entering by the side door she is done for. But then she isn't usually seen. Lord! if these walls could speak! The divorce-mills would explode. The waiters all invest in real estate.
Nowhere were the absurdities and emptiness of polite society so fully exposed as at these three fashionable resorts. Even the frivolity of Dublin paled in comparison. Mary's health improved in England. The Irish climate seems to have specially disagreed with her.
One commendatory view, while not upholding the contentions, paid Sir Edward Grey's handling of the British defense a generous tribute, albeit at the expense of Germany: "It makes no claim which offends humane sentiment or affronts the sense of natural right. It makes no insulting proposal for the barter or sale of honor, and it resorts to no tricks or evasions in the way of suggested compromise.
But all is not finished with the passage of the soul to the land of the dead; the soul may return to avenge its death by helping to discover the murderer, or to wreak vengeance for itself; there is a widespread belief that those who die a violent death become malignant spirits and endanger the lives of those who come near the haunted spot; the woman who dies in child-birth becomes a pontianak, and threatens the life of human beings; and man resorts to magical or religious means of repelling his spiritual dangers.
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