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In the very circle where so much stress is laid on a girl’s establishing herself brilliantly, the fewest possible husbands are to be found. Yet, limited as such a girl’s choice is, she will sooner remain single than accept a husband out of her set. She has a perfectly distinct idea of what she wants, and has lived so long in the atmosphere of wealth that existence without footmen and male cooks, horses and French clothes, appears to her impossible. Such large proportions do these details assume in her mind that each year the husband himself becomes of less importance, and what he can provide the essential point.

If an outsider is sufficiently rich, my lady may consent to unite her destinies to his, hoping to get him absorbed into her own world.

It is pathetic, considering the restricted number of eligible men going about, to see the trouble and expense that parents take to keep their daughters en évidence. When one reflects on the number of people who are disturbed when such a girl dines out, the horses and men and women who are kept up to convey her home, the time it has taken her to dress, the cost of the toilet itself, and then see the man to whom she will be consigned for the evening,-some bored man about town who has probably taken her mother in to dinner twenty years before, and will not trouble himself to talk with his neighbor, or a schoolboy, breaking in his first dress suit,-when one realizes that for many maidens this goes on night after night and season after season, it seems incredible that they should have the courage, or think it worth their while to keep up the game.

The logical result of turning eternally in the same circle is that nine times out of ten the men who marry choose girls out of their own set, some pretty stranger who has burst on their jaded vision with all the charm of the unknown. A conventional society maiden who has not been fortunate enough to meet and marry a man she loves, or whose fortune tempts her, during the first season or two that she is “out,” will in all probability go on revolving in an ever-narrowing circle until she becomes stationary in its centre.

In comparison with such an existence the life of the average “summer girl” is one long frolic, as varied as that of her aristocratic sister is monotonous. Each spring she has the excitement of selecting a new battle-ground for her manœuvres, for in the circle in which she moves, parents leave such details to their children. Once installed in the hotel of her choice, mademoiselle proceeds to make the acquaintance of an entirely new set of friends, delightful youths just arrived, and bent on making the most of their brief holidays, with whom her code of etiquette allows her to sail all day, and pass uncounted evening hours in remote corners of piazza or beach.

As the words “position” and “set” have no meaning to her young ears, and no one has ever preached to her the importance of improving her social standing, the acquaintances that chance throws in her path are accepted without question if they happen to be good-looking and amusing. She has no prejudice as to standing, and if her supply of partners runs short, she will dance and flirt with the clerk from the desk in perfect good humor-in fact, she stands rather in awe of that functionary, and admires the “English” cut of his clothes and his Eastern swagger. A large hotel is her dream of luxury, and a couple of simultaneous flirtations her ideal of bliss. No long evenings of cruel boredom, in order to be seen at smart houses, will cloud the maiden’s career, no agonized anticipation of retiring partnerless from cotillion or supper will disturb her pleasure.