as the notes of a thrush. Suffused in the aura of this high social
refinement and good breeding, it was impossible for her to escape a
deeper effect of it. As good habits are said to be better than good
principles, so, perhaps, good manners are better than good habits.
The teachings of your parents may not keep alive your New England
conscience; but if you sit on a straight-back chair and repeat the
words "prisms and pilgrims" forty times the devil will flee from
you. And when Nancy spoke in the Van Alstyne Fisher tones she felt
the thrill of _noblesse oblige_ to her very bones.

There was another source of learning in the great departmental
school. Whenever you see three or four shop-girls gather in a bunch
and jingle their wire bracelets as an accompaniment to apparently
frivolous conversation, do not think that they are there for the
purpose of criticizing the way Ethel does her back hair. The meeting
may lack the dignity of the deliberative bodies of man; but it
has all the importance of the occasion on which Eve and her first
daughter first put their heads together to make Adam understand his
proper place in the household. It is Woman's Conference for Common
Defense and Exchange of Strategical Theories of Attack and Repulse
upon and against the World, which is a Stage, and Man, its Audience
who Persists in Throwing Bouquets Thereupon. Woman, the most
helpless of the young of any animal--with the fawn's grace but
without its fleetness; with the bird's beauty but without its power
of flight; with the honey-bee's burden of sweetness but without
its--Oh, let's drop that simile--some of us may have been stung.

During this council of war they pass weapons one to another, and
exchange stratagems that each has devised and formulated out of the
tactics of life.