CHAPTER XXVI.
THE GOSPEL OF CONVENTIONALITIES.
Young people are proverbially intolerant, so I listened patiently, a few days since, to the outburst of an impetuous girl-friend.
"Oh," she exclaimed, "we are all such shams!" "Shams ?" I repeated, interrogatively.
"Yes, just that, shams through and through! We, you and I are no exceptions to the universal rule of, to quote Mark Twain, 'pretending to be what we ain't.' We are polite and civil when we feel ugly and cross; while in company we assume a pleasant expression although inwardly we may be raging.

All our appurtenances are make-believes.

We wear our handsome clothes to church and concert, fancying that mankind may be deceived into the notion that we always look like that.

Food cooked in iron and tin vessels is served in French china and cut glass.

When children sit down to table as ravenously hungry as small animals, their natural instincts are curbed, and they are compelled to eat slowly and 'properly.' You see it everywhere and in everything.
The whole plan of modern society, with its manners and usages, is a system of shams!" In contradistinction to this unsparing denunciation, I place Harriet Beecher Stowe's idea of this "system of shams." In "My Wife and I" she says: "You see we don't propose to warm our house with a wood fire, but only to adorn it.