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Boys and girls of eighteen would leave these dances by dozens and, hiring taxicabs, go on slumming expeditions and excursions to the remoter corners of Central Park. In several instances parties of two or four went to the Tenderloin and had supper served in private rooms.
"What makes one so mad," she said, as she sailed towards the door in a stiff rustle of Sunday brocade, "is the way in which the people who admire her talk of her. When one thinks that all this 'slumming, and all this stuff about the poor, only means keeping her husband in office and surrounding herself with a court of young men, it turns one sick!"
I guess Florence wanted to raise the culture of the Stuyvesant crowd and did it as she might have gone in slumming. Intellectual slumming, that was what it was. She always wanted to leave the world a little more elevated than she found it.
According to the purists here youth of both sexes was debauched, losing both money and souls. To speak of seeing Barbary Coast brought furtive looks and lowered voices, as if contamination even from the thought were possible. No slumming party was completed without a visit to the "Coast," after Chinatown's manufactured horrors had been shuddered at.
We pretend for a whole day to be some characters in fiction, Dickens, Thackeray, Barrie, anyone we happen to think of, and then we do the things those persons might have done. For instance, when we were slumming, I was the Marchioness and Edwin was Dick Swiveller. That was perhaps the best day of all.
So the matter remained in abeyance till the place of sojourn had been selected and tried; and meantime Gerald spent what remained of the Easter vacation in a little of exhibitions with Anna, a little of slumming with Emilia, a little of society impartially with swells and artists, and a good deal of amiable lounging and of modern reading of all kinds.
The summer colony, that year, was a large and lively one, and Phebe threw herself into it with the same fervor which had marked her entrance into slumming, and, before that, into medicine. Skeletons and syllabi appeared to be alike forgotten; golf and swimming lessons took their place, and Phebe revelled in her out-of-door life as simply and as sincerely as Mac himself.
Now, wouldn't you rather I'd go there than to those giddy theatricals? The Withrows are quite as important as the Kendalls." "Don't be sarcastic. It's very unladylike. I'm not so anxious for you to join the Guild, but I want you to go to Blanche's meeting. Mr. Huntley was telling me those girls are getting their heads full of romantic notions about slumming and all that nonsense.
The instinct of patriotism is not en évidence. The dominant passion is cupidity, and nothing higher; sheer greed of gain, lust of possession, and nothing nobler. Selfishness and the hope of plunder are the actuating impulses at the poll; crass ignorance and bitter prejudice the mental disposition of the lower class of voters. Four hours' slumming convinced me of this, and must convince anyone.
I sat down, and in my limited way I mean that, sincerely, humbly I considered what I could do. No slumming and, in any case, there's none to be done in Forest Gate. So I thought I'd better clear my vision with great books. I went to Robert Halarkenden, the only bookish person in my surroundings, and asked him about it about what would open up a larger horizon for me.
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