Go to the farthest borders of England: there are still the "county
families," and you meet servants in livery. On the other hand, in a little
village in northern New Hampshire, my friend was visited in the evening by
the landlady, who said that several of their "most fashionable ladies" had
happened in, and she would like to show them her guest's bonnet. Then the
different cities ignore each other: the rulers of select circles in New
York may find themselves nobodies in Washington, while a Washington social
passport counts for as little in New York. Boston and Philadelphia affect
to ignore both; and St. Louis and San Francisco have their own standards.
The utmost social prestige in America is local, provincial, a matter of the
square inch: it is as if the foam of each particular beach along the
seacoast were to call itself "society."

There is something pathetic, therefore, in the unwearied pains taken by
ambitious women to establish a place in some little, local, transitory
domain, to "bring out" their daughters for exhibition on a given evening,
to form a circle for them, to marry them well. A dozen years hence the
millionaires whose notice they seek may be paupers, or these ladies may be
dwelling in some other city, where the visiting cards will bear wholly
different names. How idle to attempt to transport into American life the
social traditions and delusions which require monarchy and primogeniture,
and a standing army, to keep them up--and which cannot always hold their
own in England, even with the aid of these!

Every woman, like every man, has a natural desire for influence; and if
this instinct yearns, as it often should yearn, to take in more than her
own family, she must seek it somewhere outside. I know women who bring to
bear on the building-up of a frivolous social circle--frivolous, because it
is not really brilliant, but only showy; not really gay, but only bored--
talent and energy enough to influence the mind and thought of the nation,