bitter despisers are the petty underlings of the business world, the poor office-clerks, who are often the worst exploited of proletarians, but who, because they are allowed to wear a white collar and to work in the office with the boss, regard themselves as members of the capitalist class. In exactly the same way I now discovered that every penny-a-liner and hack-writer in newspaperdom regarded himself or herself as a member of "society," and made haste to prove it by pouring ridicule upon "The Metropolis." Mrs. Corra Harris, a Southern authoress of rigid propriety, wrote an article about me in "The Independent," in which she hailed me as the "buzzard novelist," and went on to say that I had listened at the key-hole on Howard Gould's yacht. "The Independent" printed my answer, which was that I had been following my career as "buzzard novelist" for many years, and had yet to be accused of a falsehood, but that Mrs. Harris, at the very opening of her career as buzzard critic, had repeated a grotesque falsehood which I had denied again and again.
I am not proud of "The Metropolis" as a work of art; I was ill and desperately harassed when I wrote it, and I would not defend it as literature. But as a picture of the manners and morals of the "smart set" of New York, I am prepared to defend it as a mild statement of the truth. I have been charged with exaggeration in the prices I quoted, the cost of the orgies of the "smart set." These prices I had verified, not from the columns of the yellow journals, but by the inspection of bills. I was accused of crudeness in mentioning prices, because in "society" it is not good form to mention them. I would answer that this is one of the shams which "society" seeks to impose upon the wondering multitude. I have never anywhere heard such crude talk about the prices of things and the worldly possessions of people as I have heard among the idle rich in New York. And even if "society" were as austere and free from vulgarity as it wishes the penny-a-liners and hack-writers to believe, that would make no difference to me; for if people are squandering the blood and tears of the poor in luxury and wantonness, it does not seem to me such a great virtue that they avoid referring to the fact.
Also the critics were cross with the hero of the novel; they said he was a prig; he ought to have been really tempted
