You are thought to be haughty and to give yourself airs if you do not sit for twelve consecutive hours each day in unending conversation with them.
When one reflects that thousands of our countrymen pass at least one-half of their lives in these asylums, and that thousands more in America know no other homes, but move from one hotel to another, while the same outlay would procure them cosy, cheerful dwellings, it does seem as if these modern Arabs, Holmes's "Folding Bed-ouins," were gradually returning to prehistoric habits and would end by eating roots promiscuously in caves.
The contradiction appears more marked the longer one reflects on the love of independence and impatience of all restraint that characterize our race.If such an institution had been conceived by people of the Old World, accustomed to moral slavery and to a thousand petty tyrannies, it would not be so remarkable, but that we, of all the races of the earth, should have created a form of torture unknown to Louis XI.or to the Spanish Inquisitors, is indeed inexplicable! Outside of this happy land the institution is unknown.The PENSION when it exists abroad, is only an exotic growth for an American market.Among European nations it is undreamed of; the poorest when they travel take furnished rooms, where they are served in private, or go to restaurants or TABLED'HOTES for their meals.In a strictly continental hotel the public parlor does not exist.People do not travel to make acquaintances, but for health or recreation, or to improve their minds.The enforced intimacy of our American family house, with its attendant quarrelling and back-biting, is an infliction of which Europeans are in happy ignorance.