CHAPTER XVI: PHILADELPHIA AT TABLE
I
If interest in the art of eating called for justification, I could show that I come by mine legitimately. My family took care of that when the sensible ancestor who made me an American settled in Accomac, where most things worth eating were to be had for the fishing or the shooting or the digging, so that Accomac feasted while the rest of Virginia still starved, and when my Grandfather, in his day, moved to Philadelphia which is as well provided as Accomac and more conscientious in cultivating its possibilities. It would be sheer disloyalty to the family inheritance if I did not like to eat well, just as it would be rank hypocrisy to see in my loyalty a virtue.
Accomac"s reputation for good eating has barely got beyond the local history book, Accomac, I find, being a place you must have belonged to at one time or another, to know anything about. But Philadelphia made a reputation for its high living as soon as the Philadelphian emerged from his original cave, or sooner--read Watson and every other authority and you will find that before he was out of it, even the family cat occupied itself in hunting delicacies for the family feast. And right off the Philadelphian understood the truth the scientist has been centuries in groping after: that if people"s food is to do them good, they must take pleasure in it. The material was his the minute he landed on the spot, not the least recommendations of which were its fish and game and its convenience as a port where all the country did not produce could be brought from countries that did--a spot that, half-way between the North and the South, a.s.sured to Philadelphia one of the best-stocked markets in the world, ever the wonder and admiration of every visitor to the town. Pleasure in the material, if history can be trusted, dates as far back. A wise man once suggested the agreeable journeys that could be planned on a gastronomical map of France--from the Tripe of Caen to the Bouillabaisse of Ma.r.s.eilles, from the Chateau Margaux of Bordeaux to the Champagne of Rheims, from the Ducks of Rouen to the Truffles of Perigord, and so, from one end to the other of that Land of Plenty. I would suggest that an agreeable record of Philadelphia might be based upon the dinners it has eaten, from the historic dinner foraged for by the cat over a couple of centuries ago, to the banquet of yesterday in Spruce Street or Walnut, at the Bellevue or the Ritz.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE PHILADELPHIA DISPENSARY FROM INDEPENDENCE SQUARE]
I should like some day to write this history myself, when I have more s.p.a.ce and time at my disposal. I have always been blessed with a healthy appet.i.te, a decent sense of discrimination in satisfying it, and also a deep interest in the Philosophy of Food ever since I began to collect cookery books. The more profoundly I go into the subject, the readier I am to believe with Brillat-Savarin that what a man is depends a good deal on what he eats. This is why I think that if the Philadelphian is to be understood, the study of him must not stop with his politics and his literature and his art, but must include his marketing and his bill of fare. He has had the wit never to doubt the importance of both, and the pride never to make light of his genius for living well.
The early Friends in Philadelphia knew better than to pull a long face, burrowing for the snares of the flesh and the devil in every necessity of life, like the unfortunate Puritans up in New England. It was not to lead a hermit"s existence William Penn invited them to settle on the banks of the Delaware, and he and they realized that pioneer"s work could not be done on hermit"s fare. They entertained no fanatical disdain for the pleasures of the table, no ascetic abhorrence to good food, daintily prepared. Brawn and chocolate and venison were Penn"s tender offering as lover to Hannah Callowhill, olives and wine his loving gift as friend to Isaac Norris. For equally "acceptable presents"
that admirable citizen had to thank many besides Penn. James Logan knew that the best way to manage your official is to dine him, and in his day, and after it, straight on, no public commissioner, and indeed no private traveller, could visit Philadelphia and not be fed with its banquets and comforted with its Madeira and Punch, while few could refrain from saying so with an eloquence and grat.i.tude that did them honour. Benjamin Franklin, keeping up the tradition, was known to feast more excellently than a philosopher ought, and his philosophy of food is explained by his admission in a letter that he would rather discover a _recipe_ for making Parmesan cheese in an Italian town than any ancient inscription. The American Philosophical Society could not conduct its investigations without the aid of dinners and breakfasts, nor could any other Philadelphia Society or Club study, or read, or hunt, or fish, or legislate, or pursue its appointed ends, without fine cooking and hard drinking--though I hope they were not the inspiration of Thomas Jefferson"s severe criticism of his fellow Americans who, he said, were unable to terminate the most sociable meals without transforming themselves into brutes. It was impossible for young ladies and grave elders to keep descriptions of public banquets and family feasts and friendly tea-drinkings out of their letters and diaries: one reason of the fascination their letters and diaries have for Philadelphians who read them to-day. And altogether, by the Revolution, to judge from John Adams" account of his "sinful feasts" in Philadelphia, and General Greene"s description of the luxury of Boston as "an infant babe" to the luxury of Philadelphia, and the rest of America"s opinion of Philadelphia as a place of "crucifying expenses," and many more signs of the times, the dinners of Philadelphia had become so inseparable from any meeting, function, or business, that I am tempted to question whether, had they not been eaten, the Declaration of Independence could have been signed. But it was signed and who can say, in face of the fact, that Philadelphia was any the worse for its feasting? And what if it proved a dead weight to John Adams, did Boston, did any other town do more in the cause of patriotism and independence?
[Ill.u.s.tration: MORRIS HOUSE, GERMANTOWN]
One inevitable feature of the "sinful feasts" was the Madeira John Adams drank at a great rate, but suffered no inconvenience from. I could not dispense with it in these old records, such a sober place does it hold in my own memories of Philadelphia. The decanter of Madeira on my Grandfather"s dinner table marked the state occasion, and I would not have recognized Philadelphia on my return had the same decanter not been produced in welcome. It was an a.s.surance that Philadelphia was still Philadelphia, though sky-sc.r.a.pers might break the once pleasant monotony of low, red brick houses and motor horns resound through the once peaceful streets.
From the beginning Madeira was one of the things no good Philadelphia household could be without--just the sound, dignified, old-fashioned wine the Philadelphian would be expected to patronize, respectable and upright as himself. Orders for it lighten those interminably long letters in the Penn-Logan correspondence, so long that all the time I was reading them, I kept wondering which of the three I ought to pity the most: Penn for what he had to endure from his people; Logan for having to keep him posted in his intolerable wrongs; or myself for wading through all they both had to say on the subject. As time went on, I do not believe there was an official function at which Madeira did not figure. There I always find it--the wine of ceremony, the sacrificial wine, without which no compact could be sealed, no event solemnized, no pleasure enjoyed. It seems to punctuate every step in the career of Philadelphians and of Philadelphia, and I thought nothing could be more characteristic, when I read the _Autobiography_ of Franklin, than that it should have been over the Philadelphia Madeira one Governor of Pennsylvania planned a future for him, and another Governor of Pennsylvania later on discoursed provincial affairs with him, "most profuse of his solicitations and promises" under its pleasant influence. Throughout the old annals I am conscious of that decanter of Madeira always at hand, the Philadelphian "as free of it as an Apple Tree of its Fruit on a Windy Day in the month of July," one old visitor to the town records with a pretty fancy for which, as like as not, it was responsible.
And throughout the more modern records, there it is again. Even in the old-fashioned Philadelphia boarding-house less than a century ago, the men after dinner sat over their Madeira. New generations of visitors, like the old, drank it and approved, the Madeira that supported John Adams at Philadelphia"s sinful feasts helping to steer Thackeray and an endless succession of strangers at the gate through Philadelphia"s course of suppers and dinners. It amuses me to recall, as an instance of all it represented to Philadelphia, that for a couple of years at the Convent, though a healthier child than I never lived, I was made by the orders of my Father, obeyed by no means unwillingly on my part, to drink a gla.s.s of Madeira, with a biscuit, every morning at eleven. And so deep-rooted was its use in the best traditions of Philadelphia respectability, that the irreproachable Philadelphia ladies who wrote cookery books never omitted the gla.s.s of Madeira from the Terrapin, and went so far as to quote Scripture and to recommend a little of it for the stomach"s sake.
II
One of these Philadelphia ladies wrote the most famous cookery book to this day published in America; a fact which pleases me, partly because, with Edward Fitzgerald, I cannot help liking a cookery book, and still more because it flatters my pride as a Philadelphian that so famous a book should come from Philadelphia. It seems superfluous to add that I mean Miss Leslie"s _Complete Cookery_. What else could I mean?
There had been cookery books in America before Miss Leslie"s. America, with Philadelphia to set the standard, could not get on very far without them. If in the hurry and flurry of Colonial life, the American did not have the leisure to write them, he borrowed them, the speediest way to manufacture any kind of literature. There is an American edition of Mrs.
Gla.s.se, with Mrs. Gla.s.se left out--the American pirate was nothing if not thorough. There is an American edition of Richard Briggs who was not deprived of the credit of his book, though robbed of his t.i.tle.
There are American editions I have no doubt of many besides which I have only to haunt the old bookstalls and second-hand book stores of Philadelphia a.s.siduously enough to find. But of American cookery books, either borrowed or original, before the time of Miss Leslie, I own but the stolen Mrs. Gla.s.se and an insignificant little manual issued in New York in 1813, an American adaptation probably of an English model to which I have not yet succeeded in tracing it.
Nor do I know of any I do not own, and I know as much of American cookery books as any of the authorities, and I do not mind saying so, as I can without the shadow of conceit. Vicaire includes only two or three in his _Bibliographie_; Hazlitt, to save trouble, confined himself to English books; Dr. Oxford"s interest is frankly in the publications of his own country, though, in his first bibliography, he mentions a few foreign volumes, and in his second he refers to one American piracy, and these are the three chief bibliographers of the Kitchen in Europe.
American authorities do not exist, when I except myself. It is true that G. H. Ellw.a.n.ger made a list of cookery books, but he threw them together anyhow, with no attempt at cla.s.sification, and his list scarcely merits the name of bibliography. The history of the American cookery book is a virgin field, and as such I present it to the innumerable American students who are turned out from the Universities, year after year, for the research work that is frequently of as little use to themselves as to anybody else.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE STATE HOUSE COLONNADE]
But many as may be the discoveries in the future, Miss Leslie cannot be dethroned nor deprived of her distinction as the Mrs. Gla.s.se of America.
Other writers, if there were any, were allowed to disappear; should they be dragged out of their obscurity now, it would be as bibliographical curiosities, bibliographical specimens. Miss Leslie was never forgotten, she survives to-day, her name honoured, her book cherished. She leapt into fame on its publication, and with such ardour was the First Edition bought up, with such ardour either reverently preserved or diligently consulted that I, the proud possessor of Mrs. Gla.s.se in her First Edition "pot folio," of Apicius Coelius, Gervase Markham, Scappi, Grimod de la Reyniere, and no end of others in their first Editions, cannot as yet boast a First Edition of Miss Leslie. I have tried, my friends have tried; the most important book-sellers in the country have tried; and in vain, until I begin to think I might as well hope for the Elzevir _Patissier Francais_ as the 1837 _Complete Cookery_. It may be hidden on some unexplored Philadelphia book shelf, for it was as indispensable in the Philadelphia household as the decanter of Madeira. I ask myself if its appreciation in the kitchen, for which it was written, is the reason why I have no recollection of it in the Eleventh and Spruce Street house, well as I remember _Lippincott"s_ on the back parlour table, nor in my Father"s library, well as I recall his editions of Scott and d.i.c.kens, Voltaire and Rousseau, a combination expressive of a liberal taste in literature. But never anywhere have I seen that elusive First Edition, never anywhere succeeded in obtaining an earlier edition than the Fifty-Eighth. The date is 1858--think of it! fifty-eight editions in twenty-one years! Can our "Best Sellers" surpa.s.s that as a record? Or can any American writer on cookery after Miss Leslie, from Mrs. Sarah Joseph Hale and Jenny June to Marion Harland and the Philadelphia Mrs.
Rorer, rank with her as a rival to Mrs. Gla.s.se, as the author of a cookery book that has become the rare prize of the collector?
III
It is so proud an eminence for a quiet Philadelphia maiden lady in the Eighteen-Thirties and Forties to have reached that I cannot but wish I knew more of Miss Leslie personally. From her contemporaries I have learned nothing save that she went to tea parties like any ordinary Philadelphian, that she was interested in the legends and traditions of her town, which wasn"t like any ordinary Philadelphian, and that she condescended to journalism, editing _The Casket_. There is a portrait of her at the Academy, Philadelphia decorum so stamped upon her face and dress that it makes me more curious than ever to know why she was not the mother of children instead of a writer of books. These books explain that she had a literary conscience. In her preface to her _Domestic Economy_, which is not an unworthy companion to her _Complete Cookery_, she reveals an unfeminine respect for style. "In this as in her Cookery Book," she writes, a dignity expressed in her use of the third person, "she has not scrupled when necessary, to sacrifice the sound to the sense; repeating the same words when no others could be found to express the purport so clearly, and being always more anxious to convey the meaning in such terms as could not be mistaken than to risk obscuring it by attempts at refined phraseology or well-rounded periods." Now and then the temptation was too strong and she fell into alliteration, writing of "ponderous puddings and curdled custards." But this is exceptional. As a rule, in her dry, business-like sentences, it would be impossible to suspect her of philandering with sound, or concerning herself with the pleasure of her readers.
Her subject is one, happily, that can survive the sacrifice. The book is a monument to Philadelphia cookery. She was not so emanc.i.p.ated as to neglect all other kitchens. _Recipes_ for Soup _a la Julienne_ and Mulligatawny, for Bath Buns and Gooseberry Fools, for Pilaus and Curries, are concessions to foreign conventions. _Recipes_ for Oysters and Shad, for Gumbo and Buckwheat Cakes, for Mint Juleps and Sweet Potatoes, for Pumpkins and Mush, show her deference to ideals cultivated by Americans from one State or another. But concessions and deference do not prevent her book--her two books--from being unmistakably Philadelphian:--an undefinable something in the quality and quant.i.ty, a definable something in the dishes and ingredients. I know that in my exile, thousands of miles from home, when I open her _Complete Cookery_, certain pa.s.sages transport me straight back to Philadelphia, to my childhood and my youth, to the second-story back-building dining-room and the kitchen with the lilacs at the back-yard door. I read of Dried Beef, chipped or frizzled in b.u.t.ter and eggs, and, as of old in the Eleventh and Spruce Street house, a delicious fragrance, characteristic of Philadelphia as the sickly smell of the ailanthus, fills my nostrils and my appet.i.te is keen again for the eight o"clock tea, long since given way to the eight o"clock dinner. I turn the pages and come to Reed Birds, roasted or baked, and at once I feel the cool of the radiant fall evening, and I am at Belmont or Strawberry Mansion after the long walk through the park, one of the gay party for whom the cloth is laid. Or the mere mention of Chicken Salad sets back the clock of the years and drops me into the chattering midst of the Philadelphia five o"clock reception, in time for the spread that, for sentiment"s sake, is dear to me in memory, but that, for digestion"s sake, I hope never to see revived. Or a thrill is in the dressing for the salad alone, in the mere dash of mustard that Philadelphia has the independence to give to its Mayonnaise. I am conservative in matters of art. I would not often recommend a deviation from French precedent which is the most reliable and the finest. But Philadelphia may be trusted to deviate, when it permits itself the liberty, with discretion and distinction.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SMITH MEMORIAL, WEST FAIRMOUNT PARK]
CHAPTER XVII: PHILADELPHIA AT TABLE--CONTINUED
I
So much of Philadelphia is in Miss Leslie that her silence on one or two matters essentially Philadelphian is the greater disappointment.
I have said that when I was young it was the business of the man of the house to market and to make the Mayonnaise for the dinner"s salad, and I have searched for the reason in vain. His appropriation of the marketing seems to be comparatively modern. If the chronicles are to be trusted, it was the woman"s business as late as Mrs. Washington"s day. But by mine, the man"s going to market had settled solidly into one of those Philadelphia customs taken for granted by Philadelphians simply because they were Philadelphia customs. Never in print have I seen any reference to this division of family labour except in the Philadelphia stories of Thomas A. Janvier who, as a Philadelphian, knew that it became well brought up Philadelphia men to attend to the marketing and that duties becoming to them were above explanation. Janvier knew also that only in Philadelphia, probably, could it occur to the "master of a feast" to dress the salad, and that this was the reason "why a better salad is served at certain dinner tables in Philadelphia than at any other dinner tables in the whole world." Miss Leslie is not without honour in her own town and was there reverenced by no one as truly as by Janvier, but his reverence for the Art of Cookery was more profound and he shared the belief of the initiated that in it man surpa.s.ses as. .h.i.therto, I regret to say, he has surpa.s.sed in all the arts.
Janvier himself was the last "master of the feast" it was my good fortune to watch preparing the Mayonnaise. It was a solemn rite in his hands, and the result not unworthy--his salads were delicious, perfect, original, their originality, however, never pushed to open defiance of the Philadelphia precedents he respected. One of my pleasantest memories of him is of his salad-making at his own dinner table in his London rooms, one or two friends informally gathered about him, and the summer evening so warm that he appeared all in white--a splendid presence, for he was an unusually handsome man, of the rich, flamboyant type that has gone out of fashion almost everywhere except in the South of France. The white added, somehow, to the effect of ceremony, and he lingered over every stage of the preparation and the mixing,--the Philadelphia touch of mustard not omitted,--with due gravity and care. How different the salad created with this ceremony from the usual makeshift mixed n.o.body knows how or where!
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BASIN, OLD WATER-WORKS]
That the Philadelphia man should have accepted this responsibility, explains better than I could how high is the Philadelphia standard. I could not understand Miss Leslie"s silence on the subject, did I not suspect her of a disapproval as complete as her Cookery. She had no new-fangled notions on the position of woman, no desire to dispute man"s long-established superiority. If she was willing to teach women how to become accomplished housewives, it was that they might administer to the comfort and satisfy the appet.i.te of their fathers and brothers and husbands and sons. The end of woman, according to her creed, is to make the home agreeable for man, and it would save us many of to-day"s troubles if we agreed with her. No man, since it is to his advantage, will blame her for being more orthodox as a woman than as a Philadelphian, nor is it at very great cost that I forgive her. I prize her book too much from the collector"s standpoint, if from no other, to resent its sentiment. And my joy in my copy--in my Fifty-eighth Edition--is none the less because it was presented to me by Janvier who, in a few short stories, gave the spirit of the Philadelphia feast as Miss Leslie, in two substantial volumes, collected and cla.s.sified its materials.
Another thing I do not find in Miss Leslie is the Oyster Croquette, which she could not have ignored had she once eaten it. Therefore I am led to see in it the product of a generation nearer my own. In my memories of childhood it is inseparable from my Grandmother"s eight o"clock tea on evenings when the family were invited in state--in my memories of youth inseparable from every afternoon or evening party at which I feasted fearlessly and well--and it figured at many a Sunday high-tea, that exquisite feast which, by its very name, refuses to let itself be confounded with its coa.r.s.er counterpart known to the English as a meat-tea. From these facts I conclude, though I have no other data to rely upon, that the Oyster Croquette must have been not simply the masterpiece, but the creation of Augustine, for the Oyster Croquette which the well-brought-up Philadelphian then ate at moments of rejoicing was always of his cooking.
II
Augustine--the explanation is superfluous for Philadelphians of my age--was a coloured man with the genius of his race for cookery and probably a drop or more of the white blood that developed in him also the genius for organization, so that he was a leader among caterers, as well as a master among cooks. It is worth noting that the demand for cooks in Philadelphia being great, the greatest cooks in America never failed to supply it: worth noting also that the Philadelphia housewife, being thus well supplied, had not begun when I was young to amuse herself with the chafing-dish as she does now. For many years, Augustine"s name and creations were the chief distinction of every Philadelphia feast. To have entertained without his a.s.sistance would have been as serious a crime as to have omitted Terrapin--in season--and Ice-cream from the Philadelphia menu; as daring as to have gone for chocolates anywhere save to Penas" or for smilax anywhere save to Pennock"s, and this sort of daring in Philadelphia would have been deplored not as harmless originality, but as eccentricity in the worst possible taste. Thanks to Augustine, Philadelphia became celebrated in America for its Oyster Croquettes and Terrapin and Broiled Oysters--what a work of genius this, with the sauce of his invention!--as Bresse is in France for its Chickens, or York in England for its Hams.
So much I know about him, and no more--but his name should go down in history with those of Vatel and Careme and Gouffe: an artist if ever there was one! Because he did not commit suicide like Vatel--his oysters were never late--because he did not write encyclopedias of cookery like Careme and Gouffe, his name and fame are in danger of perishing unless every Philadelphian among my contemporaries hastens to lay a laurel leaf upon his grave. I fear nothing as yet has been done to preserve his memory. His name survives on the simple front of a South Fifteenth Street house, where I saw it and rejoiced when I was last at home and, in compliment to him, went inside and ate my lunch in the demure light of a highly respectable dining-room in the society of a dozen or more highly respectable Philadelphians seated at little tables. I could not quarrel with my lunch--it was admirably cooked and served--but it was an everyday lunch, not the occasional feast--the Augustine of old did not cook the ordinary meal and the Fifteenth Street house is too modest to be accepted as the one and only monument to his memory.
[Ill.u.s.tration: GIRARD STREET]
The Oyster Croquette could not have sprung up in a day and triumphed were Philadelphia as hide-bound with convention as it is supposed to be.
Philadelphia is conservative in matters of cookery when conservatism means clinging to its great traditions; it is liberal when liberality means adapting to its own delightful ends the new idea or the new masterpiece. It never ceased to be sure of its materials nor of their variety, the Philadelphia market half way between North and South continuing to provide what is best in both: the meats of the finest--the fattest mutton he ever saw, Cobbett, though an Englishman, found in Philadelphia--its fruits and vegetables of the most various, its b.u.t.ter, good Darlington b.u.t.ter, famed from one end of the land to the other. And in the preparation of its materials, for the sake of eating better, Philadelphians never have hesitated to take their good where they have found it. Dishes we prize as the most essentially Philadelphian have sometimes the shortest pedigree. Why, the Ice-cream that is now one of Philadelphia"s most respected inst.i.tutions, came so recently that people we, of my generation, knew could remember its coming. On my return to Philadelphia, with the advantage the perspective absence gives, I could appreciate more clearly than if I had stayed at home how well Philadelphia eats and how n.o.bly it has maintained its old ideals, how n.o.bly accepted new ones. It has not wavered in the practice of eating well and taking pleasure in the eating--the reputation of giving good dinners is, as in my youth, the most highly prized. To quote Janvier: "The person who achieves celebrity of this sort in Philadelphia is not unlike the seraph who attains eminence in the heavenly choir." But I am conscious of a lat.i.tude that would not have been allowed before in the choice of a place to eat them in, and amazed at the number of new dishes.
III
The back-building dining-room was the one scene I knew for the feast. If I were a man I could tell a different tale. As a woman I used to hear--all Philadelphia women used to hear--of colossal masculine banquets at the Philadelphia Club and the Union League, of revels at the Clover Club, of fastidious feasts at more esoteric clubs--the State in Schuylkill, the Fish-House Club, and what were the others?--clubs carrying on the great Colonial traditions, perpetuating the old Colonial Punch as zealously as the Vestal Virgins watched their sacred fire, observing mystic practices in the Kitchen, the Philadelphia man himself, it was said, putting on the cook"s ap.r.o.n, presiding over grills and saucepans, and serving up dishes of such exquisite quality as it has not entered into the mind of mere woman to conceive or to execute: with the true delicacy of the gourmet choosing rather to consecrate his talents to the one perfect dish than to squander them upon many, shrinking as an artist must from the plebeian "groaning-board" of the gluttonous display. To stories of these marvels I listened again and again, but my only knowledge of them is based on hearsay. I would as soon have expected to be admitted to Mount Athos or to the old Chartreuse as to banquets and feasts and revels so purely masculine; to ask for the vote would have seemed less ambitious than to pray for admission. What folly then it would be for me to pretend to describe them! What presumption to affect a personal acquaintance I have not and could not have! Into what pitfalls of ignorance would I stumble! It is for the Philadelphia man some day to write this particular chapter in the history of Philadelphia at Table.
As to the Philadelphia woman at the period of which I speak, she had no Clubs. It was not supposed to be good form for her to feast outside of the back-building dining-room. She might relieve her hunger with Oysters in Jones"s dingy little shop, or a plate of Ice-cream in Sautter"s sombre saloon; or, with a boating party in spring or summer, she might go for dinner or supper to one of the restaurants in the Park. But for more serious entertaining, home, or her friends" home, was the place.
Not that she was, as the fragile, fainting Angelina type once admired, too ethereal to think of food and drink. She could order and eat a luncheon, or a dinner, with the best, though she did not do the marketing or make the Mayonnaise. But she would rather have gone without food than defy the unwritten Philadelphia law.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE UNION LEAGUE, FROM BROAD AND CHESTNUT STREETS]
Now Philadelphia has changed all that. The wise remain faithful to the back-building dining-room and, within its grave and tranquil walls, on its substantial leather-covered chairs, Stuart"s Washington looking down from his place above the mantelpiece, they continue to feast with a luxury Lucullus might have envied. Fashion, however, drives the less wise to more frivolous scenes. I never thought to see the day when I should, in Philadelphia, lunch at a large, well-appointed, luxurious woman"s club, when I should be invited to feast at the Union League--my lunch there was one of the most extraordinary of all my extraordinary experiences on my return to Philadelphia--when the cloth for my dinner would be laid in a big, gay, noisy, crowded Country Club--and yet the miracle had been worked in my absence and I saw not the day, but the many days when these things happened. Not only this. In Clubs and Country Clubs a degree of privacy is still a.s.sured. But it is a degree too much, to judge from the way Philadelphia rushes to lunch, and dine, and drink the tea it does not want at five o"clock, in hotels and restaurants: our little secluded oyster saloons exchanged for dazzling lunch counters, the Spruce and Pine and Walnut Street house that could not be except in Philadelphia deserted for the Ritz and the Bellevue that might be in New York or Chicago, Paris or London, Vienna or Rome.
The old fashion was to celebrate the feast in cloistered seclusion, to let none intrude who was not bidden to share it. Now the fashion is to cry out and summon the mob and the mult.i.tude to gaze upon Philadelphia feasting. I know that this is in a measure the result of a change that is not peculiar to Philadelphia alone. All the world to-day, wherever you go, dines in public--the modern Dives must always dine where his Lazarus cannot possibly mistake the gate. But I could not have believed that Philadelphia would come to it--that Philadelphia would step out from the sanctuary into the market-place and proclaim to the pa.s.ser-by the luxury he had once so scrupulously kept to himself.