Part 2

When Mrs. Jones goes to the expense of giving a dinner party, does she only invite her nearest and dearest, who are acquainted with the extent of Jones's purse? Not a bit of it. She invites most of her enemies and some strangers. There really should be a limit to the attention one bestows on the stranger within his gates.

There was dear old Mrs. Carter Patterson in the days of my youth. She was a funny old woman with a nose like a beak, a rusty Chantilly lace veil, and a black front. She stopped my mother in the street and explained that she was in a tearing hurry as she was about to call on Mrs. Mangles.

"Why, I thought," and my simple mother hesitated, "I thought you said you hated her."

"So I do, my dear, so I do, but I always make a point of calling on my enemies, it's no use calling on one's friends."

Who has not studied the increasing difficulty of that surgical operation called the launching of a young girl into modern society. Every year it grows more and more difficult--society seems to form a kind of trust to keep out the young girl, at least to judge from the extreme difficulty of getting her in; and after she is in, the bitterness of it, and vexation of spirit, only the young girl knows. The operation is different in different countries, though one has heard of the agonies endured in England during the process. In America the ceremony is as expensive as a wedding. Because one girl has had a huge coming-out reception, that shakes her pa's cheque book to its centre, why the other girl must have a still bigger one.

I have been a witness to the coming out of Maria's only child Nancy. The education of Nancy was not so much to teach her anything, as to give her the best opportunity of making fashionable acquaintances. It was my privilege to study her mother's heroic efforts to get Nancy into a fashionable dancing-school, the entrance to which gave the fortunate one that supreme distinction which nothing else could. Twice "mother" failed, and she wept in my presence in sheer weariness of soul, but the third time Nancy got in--not triumphantly, but she slipped in by some oversight of a fashionable matron whose duty it was to keep out ineligible little children, and "mother" was happy, though the little "400" boys in the round dances did neglect Nancy, who looked shyly and wistfully about, a small melancholy wall-flower, with her eyes swimming with tears, as the little boys wisely footed it with all the most eligible of the "400" little girls. It is very instructive to see how early the sense of worthy worldly wisdom develops itself!

But Nancy had passed through all these stages of social martyrdom, and had comfortably hardened. Talk of the Spartan boy with the fox nibbling at his vitals! There are worse things than having a fox nibble at your vitals--Nancy knew.

When I met "mother" the morning of the coming-out of Nancy, she was nearly in a condition of nervous prostration. The house was in the clutches of florists and caterers, and father had fled to his office with the strict injunction not to appear until late in the afternoon. The awful problems were two: Would Nancy get as many bouquets as a rival "bud"--the technical name for a debutante--who had reached the acme of social distinction with two hundred and thirty-five, and would enough people come to make a show?

"I shall die if she doesn't get as many bouquets as that Bell girl," "mother" cried in an ecstasy of nervous anguish, "but she has only got two hundred and ten."

"It's as bad as getting married," I cried sympathetically.

"Quite," and Maria groaned; "and without any real result."

Between a confusion of carpet covering and potted plants I went upstairs in search of the "bud."

"Only two hundred and ten bouquets," she cried in a tempest of discontent, "and Betty Bell (the rival bud) is to have a five-thousand-dollar ball and I am not! Mother says it isn't giving the ball she'd mind, but it's people not coming. It's easy enough sending out invitations, but the mean thing is, people accept and don't come. That's the latest fashion," cried this bitter "bud." "Mother said she'd be mortified to death to give a ball and have nobody but the waiters to drink up the champagne. We're of just enough importance to have our invitations accepted and thrown over if anything better turns up."

Such was her perfectly justifiable wail.

That afternoon at six I came again in my best clothes. A reception is after all the simplest of social functions. It entails no obligations, and is as democratic as an electric car. It is perhaps one of the few functions in which even the noblest society may use its elbows, and as a school for staring, the kind that sees through the amplest human body as if it were mere air, nothing could be more useful and practical. It is an interesting study to observe how the female lorgnette is on such occasions so triumphant an impediment to sight.

Well, the whole street proclaimed the coming-out of Nancy. Carriages lined the curbstones and an awning announced the festive nature of the occasion. A band, crowded into a cubby-hole usually sacred to "father's" overcoats and umbrellas, tried vainly to penetrate the talk--there was a dense crush of human beings, and over all there was a mixed aroma of hot air, flowers, and coffee. At the top of the "parlour," before a bank of flowers, and burdened with bouquets, stood Nancy, all in expensive white simplicity, her face radiant, and supported by an utterly exhausted mother. Six young men who served as ushers, in collars tall enough for a giraffe, brought up relays of friends to be introduced to mother and "bud"--all just like a wedding, only the hero was wanting, and for "mother's" sake one did wish the occasion had had a hero. Last year's "buds" were brought up and examined this year's "bud," and there was a great deal of chatter and hand-shaking, of the pump-handle kind, and a pushing past each other of magnificent matrons in the latest things in hats.

I was escorted up by one of the young giraffes, who solemnly introduced me. A mighty different "bud" this from the one of the morning.

"I've got two hundred and forty bouquets," she whispered triumphantly; and just then I caught mother's weary eye and knew as absolutely as one knows anything in this uncertain world that "father" had sent in thirty. Really, there is nothing so loving, so generous and so weak in this wide world as an American father.

I was swept on by a crush of prosperous matrons accompanied by expensively simple daughters--the matrons making obviously disparaging mental criticisms about each other's daughters. For real simple, unassuming jealousy there is nothing like rival mothers! So I was pushed into the dining-room where the chief ornaments were four Gibson girls in party frocks who, at a flower-laden centre-table, in the mellow light of rose-shaded candles, dispensed glances, coffee, smiles, and tea, and other frivolous afternoon refreshments. They had the best of it, these beautiful young things at the table, especially when they could annex an occasional man.

At half past seven the last visitor had gone, the function was over and Nancy was "out," and "mother" sat drearily on a couch which had the demoralised air of furniture horribly out of place. Everything drooped except those stalwart American beauty roses, so costly, so splendid, so hard, and so unromantic. O national flower of Americans!

I caught a glimpse of "father" vanishing down the front steps on his way to the club. Nancy had flung herself into a big deep chair, and from this point she looked coldly at "mother."

"The Perkinses did not come," was all she said, but "mother" gave a start and groaned. The Perkinses represented the bloom of the occasion, and the Perkinses had not come. There was nothing further to be said--Maria did remark that it was as expensive as a wedding. "And to think it isn't dinner time yet," she added drearily.

"At any rate Nancy is 'out,'" I said.

"But it was horribly expensive."

"Well, then, what did you have all this expense and bother for?"

"One has to do it," she cried in stony despair; "it's our standard--"

"Champagne standard," I interrupted.

"I don't know what you mean." Maria has all the virtues, but no sense of humour.

"Then, for goodness' sake, why have her come out at all?"

Maria shuddered and looked cautiously about. Nancy had vanished.

"I'd die of mortification if she didn't marry. I won't have her turn on me and say I hadn't given her a chance."

"But, Maria, you married your good and prosperous Samuel without coming out. That didn't frighten him away! The highest standard your parents ever aspired to was cider, and that only on state occasions."

"That is all changed," said my unhappy friend. "We have got to--"

"Pretend; that's just it, Maria! But why don't you give up pretending and be happy? Did our parents ever pretend? They didn't. Think of your father's simple home and his big bank account, and then think of your Samuel with all his expenses and his cares."

But Maria was not to be convinced by argument--she was completely crushed by the Perkinses not having come, and she declared obstinately that her supreme duty in life was to get Nancy married--well if possible, but at any rate married.

* * * * *

Maria is only a type, but she stands for aspirations in the wrong place, and she is worn out with it. She has many virtues--that is, she has no vices. Her whole soul is wrapped up in Nancy. Nancy is her religion. She believes in Nancy, though she never took her Samuel seriously. She married him in the simple period of her existence, and by the time she began to aspire she had other ideals, and Samuel was more of a bore to her than an ideal. Samuel did not take to her new aspirations as readily as she. Men never do. Nancy constituted her romance; and yet she was an impartial mother, for mothers can be divided in two classes, those who are too partial and those who are impartial. Her mission in life was to marry off Nancy.

"I'd rather she'd be married unhappily than not at all," she said to me one day when I saw her again. "A real unhappiness is more healthy to bear than an imaginary one."

Nancy herself furnished the particulars of her own private creed.

"I'd rather be married even if I were unhappy. It's my own unhappiness, and I want my own whatever it is."

I suggested that there were other aims in life than getting married.

"Perhaps," she said, "but I haven't any. I've been brought up to that. Most girls are, only they don't tell. I haven't to earn my living and I haven't any talent for anything. If I don't marry, Ma'll be mortified to death and she'll show it and that'll make me mad. Father won't care and he won't notice that I'm growing older, though we girls don't grow old prettily. We get pinched, and our little hands--for we have little hands--grow clawy, and our hair gets thin at the temples, and we have too much gold in our front teeth. Of course we are real pretty when we are happy. But think of spending life seeing father go to sleep after dinner, and mother playing patience--ugh! I've told mother if she doesn't take me abroad I'll go slumming. There's no chance here. Half the men are too busy making money to get married and the others are afraid."

"So this is your education," I said later on to Maria; "I am glad you have only one child."

"So am I," said Maria wearily, "for two would kill me."

Then in a burst of confidence: "She hangs fire. She isn't strikingly plain nor strikingly beautiful, one's about as good as the other. She has no accomplishments, and her golf is only so so. She isn't fast, nor loud, nor smart. She is just an average girl and," Maria cried in vexation, "there are such heaps of them. The luncheons and dinners and theatre parties I have given without result! It is so tiresome for her always to be bridesmaid. So we're going abroad. Father is willing to live at the Club. Our men are too comfortable to get married. It's simply wicked!"

"Maria," I said from my inmost conviction, "you have manoeuvred, with the result that you have frightened off the eligibles--struggling eligibles, and those are sometimes the best. But what struggler would dare to ask a champagne-standard girl to keep his "flat"? It's flats these days. He wouldn't think of dragging a white-tulled angel from a palatial residence to a flat and a joint! You have frightened off the young men. Marriage is getting out of fashion, and so are the comforts of a home. It's all your fault, you champagne-standard mothers!"

Such was the coming-out of Nancy.

Now in my young days there was certainly no formal coming-out. All I remember is that one day I still wore my hair in two pigtails, and the next day old Mrs. Barnett Pendexter called. She was a fumbly old woman with her fingers, and by accident--my sisters always declared--she left two cards instead of one. The fatal result was that my pigtails were pinned up and I was dragged out by my mother when she made calls, for she declared, being socially learned, that now I was undoubtedly out. It was also a little surgical operation in a minor way, but compared to these days how simple and how inexpensive.

If one were asked which of the passions is the greatest force in modern Society, one could safely reply "jealousy." Jealousy makes the world go round. Don't we want what all our neighbours have, and don't we want it with all our might and main? If we want it badly enough crime will not stand in the way of getting it. Is it not at the bottom of most of our defalcations, embezzlements, and commercial dishonesty in general? The bank president who borrows the bank funds for his private use, the cashier who falsifies the books, the little clerk who embezzles as the result of expensive tastes,--are they not all the results of the falsity and extravagance of modern life? Compared to the judicious business man who keeps just within the border line that saves him from the criminal law, and who lays traps for his credulous fellow-creatures in the shape of alluring companies, the pickpocket, who runs some little risk, is a blameless and worthy character. The champagne standard is the whole world's measure, and even justice bows to it when it interprets its laws for the rich and the poor. A company promoter, who in the course of his career has wrecked thousands of lives, can, if he is only rich enough, consort with the noblest and most virtuous of the land; but of course he must be rich enough. Deny it who can? Be rich enough and you are forgiven all crimes. O Champagne Standard!

Last year a certain deceased millionaire was tried in London for gigantic frauds, and all the newspapers described how pleasantly he greeted his friends when he entered the court and took his seat behind his counsel. Positively not a bit proud. There was also a sympathetic description of his clothes! The moral is, be a scoundrel on a magnificent scale and you are still respected; indeed, you even become a hero in some people's eyes. Justice being blindfolded cannot see, which is a great convenience. Besides, are we not taught that God helps those who help themselves?

In America there is no aristocracy yet, but God help it when the time arrives, for it will be an aristocracy based on the most unworthy of foundations--money. As for romantic traditions, well, it will take several centuries to weave a halo of romance around a pork-packer, a petroleum magnate, a railroad wrecker, or the company promoters who flourish as the green bay tree. In centuries they may arrive at the dignity of being ancestors--at present they are just what they are, and are to be judged accordingly.

There is a growing mania in America these days for ancestors. It is a luxury which can be indulged in only after people have accumulated money. If you are grubbing for your daily bread it is a matter of profound indifference to you where you came from, seeing what you have reached is so unsatisfactory. But when your bank-book bursts with deposits and your greed for money is partly satisfied, it is natural that you should look out for new fields for your aspirations. So wealthy Americans are just now very busy unearthing ancestors, in spite of not becoming parents, and getting their genealogical tree planted, and rummaging in the dust of the past for possible forefathers, and buying family portraits. Yes, there is a great trade in family portraits--the dingier the better. At any rate it keeps the pot boiling for many a worthy painter, and that is something. Not that one has a rooted aversion to ancestors--they are not to be despised if they leave you an honourable name, a nice old estate, and cash and some brains, but there are ancestors of whom the less said the better, and whose only legacy would appear to be a slanting forehead, a weak chin, and a tendency to unlimited viciousness.

The Herald's College could tell many a queer story of our sturdy republicans in search of their forbears. An English woman told me that a New York family had annexed a crusading forefather of her own, as well as one who had had his head chopped off, and to whom they had no more right than the grocer round the corner. She acknowledged that they were a pretty bad lot (the ancestors), but she objected to have strangers meddle with them. "You are funny republicans," she added genially, "coming over here and grabbing our ancestors."

Now there is nothing so frank as a frank Englishwoman. "What is the use of celebrated ancestors," she added, "if your whole present family are as dull as ditch-water and bore you to distraction? I'd swap off my crusading ancestor and my chopped-off-head one any time for a cousin with brains. But mind you, I don't want your American millionaires grabbing 'em without leave."

There are the Bedfords of New York. Susan and I went to school together. Hitherto she has put on no airs with me, for I know the family traditions, and that her excellent father began life as a cobbler. Then he forsook cobbling and started a corset manufactory, which was a distinguished success because he had invented a bone so like the whale's that even that clever fish could not have proved it wasn't his; and the deception made the old man's fortune. Thereupon he rose superior and soared from corsets to real estate, and in real estate he made what was briefly described as "mints." It was in the corset period that Susan married Joe Bedford who was a drummer in the business, and though he retired from corsets and went into real estate along with his father-in-law, Susan was always conscious that he could never accommodate himself to the grandeur of his new life. She had to do all the aspiring, and it was she who passed a sponge over their previous existence, and every time I saw them in New York she had added a new lustre to their glory. The last time the door was opened to me by a footman, brooded over, as it were, by the very noblest kind of English butler. I saw at once that the whole family were afraid to death of him. But in spite of her grandeur, Susan herself saw me downstairs to the front door, in the American fashion, though conscious of the profound and stony disapproval of the English butler. As I came opposite the hat rack I caught sight of a satin banner covered with cabalistic characters floating gently over Joe's modest bowler that swung from a peg.

"Our coat of arms," Susan explained by way of introduction. "Just come home. It cost a great deal; everything costs so much. We have the same arms as the Duke of Bedford. It is pleasant to have a duke in the family."

"Since when?" I asked, and stared in astonishment.

"I found them in the dictionary six months ago. I had it done at Tiffany's. It looks so stylish on the plates and the writing paper."

"Come in here, Susan," and I led her into her own parlour, for I did not wish to lower her in the estimation of that noble being who was preparing his mighty mind to show me out. "Listen to me; you and Joe haven't any more to do with the Duke of Bedford than the cat's foot. Besides, his name isn't Bedford but Russell. For goodness' sake don't make such an idiot of yourself."

"I guess," and Susan was deeply offended, "I guess the young man at Tiffany's knows more about it than you do. He engraves for the first families, and he said it was all right."

It was quite recently, too, that I crossed from Boston with three gentle female pilgrims in search of an ancestor. The youngest was nearly seventy, and we were barely out of sight of that famous tail of land called "Cape Cod" when they told me their simple story. They came from Cape Cod and their homestead stood on a sandhill and faced the sea. A long straggling street up a sand bank culminated in a meeting-house with a steeple as sharp as a toothpick. They were innocent and graphic old ladies and they had only two vivid interests in life; one was a Devonshire ancestor supposed to have died three hundred years before, and the other, two cats called respectively Priscilla and John Alden. The ancestor was the one romance of their placid lives, and it became a question of going to find him, now or never; so here they were. They had turned the key in the lock of their Cape Cod homestead and bidden a long farewell to Priscilla and John Alden, and as they described their grief I saw their three pairs of benevolent eyes fill with tears.

"The sweetest cats that ever breathed," said the oldest, with a face like a benediction.

"What did you do with them?" I asked after a sympathetic pause.

"We chloroformed them," said the dear old thing whose face was like a benediction.

I offered up an involuntary smile to the manes of these deceased martyrs, Priscilla and John Alden, and I am absolutely sure the ancestor wasn't worth the sacrifice.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the champagne standard, like hotel cooking, has no nationality. It is everywhere, and one studies it according to one's experience, but it is undoubtedly the curse of an age that only judges of success by material results. It is above everything a menace to character.

Modern life is the apotheosis of trivialities, and perhaps there is nothing more curious and melancholy than to observe their exaggerated importance to the world in general. One asks what is the use of such childish fretting to people confronted by tragic realities. What is the use of snubbing any one as if we were immortal? The truth is, each, in his own estimation, is immortal. Who thinks of dying? Why, if we expected to die at once, we certainly would not snub any one, and, in the face of so tragic a probability, we would not notice being snubbed. And yet there is absolutely nothing so absolutely certain as death, before which every pretence, every ignoble aspiration, every sordid ambition, stands naked and futile and, in some other world possibly, ashamed.

But one cannot help wondering what kind of a blissful place the world would be without the champagne standard. How good and honest we should be if we didn't pretend--how easy it would be to live! Are not most of the trials of life, apart from its tragedies, its results? Most of our harrowing anxieties usually have their rise in aiming at what is beyond our reach. And yet what, in the name of common sense, what is it all for? What is the use of pretending? What is the use of doing things badly when it is so much easier not to do them at all?

Yes, indeed, the greatest heroism in these days is to have the courage of one's income. It is possibly a little awkward at first, but what a relief to be able to say simply, "I can't afford it," and not lose caste! But Modern Society is ruled over by "Appearances." Appearances are a kind of Juggernaut which requires our happiness and peace and contentment as a daily sacrifice--but not the wise and honourable appearances, but the little, mean, false ones, and those are the most common.