A Traveler from Altruria; Romance

Excerpt: ...women whose eagerness to make a point excludes the consideration even of their own advantage. I'm sure, she said, as if speaking for the upper classes, we haven't got any individuality at all. We are as like as so many peas or pins. In fact, you have to be so in society. If you keep asserting your own individuality too much, people avoid you. It's very vulgar and the greatest bore. Then you don't find individuality so desirable, after all, said the Altrurian. I perfectly detest it! cried the lady, and evidently she had not the least notion where she was in the argument. For my part, I'm never happy except when I've forgotten myself and the whole individual bother. Her declaration seemed somehow to close the incident, and we were all silent a moment, which I employed in looking about the room, and taking in with my literary sense the simplicity and even bareness of its furnishing. There was the bed where the invalid lay, and near the head a table with a pile of books and a kerosene-lamp on it, and I decided that she was a good deal wakeful, and that she read by that lamp when she could not sleep at night. Then there were the hard chairs we sat on, and some home-made hooked rugs, in rounds and ovals, scattered about the clean floor; there was a small melodeon pushed against the wall; the windows had paper shades, and I recalled that I had not seen any blinds on the outside of the house. Over the head of the bed hung a cavalryman's sword, with its belt-the sword that Mrs. Makely had spoken of. It struck me as a room where a great many things might have happened, and I said: You can't think, Mrs. Camp, how glad I am to see the inside of your house. It seems to me so typical. A pleased intelligence showed itself in her face, and she answered: Yes, it is a real old-fashioned farmhouse. We have never taken boarders, and so we have kept it as it was built pretty much, and only made such changes in it as we needed or wanted for ourselves....