to tell you that he has never visited the "Tower," it has become
good form to ignore the sight-seeing side of Europe; hundreds of
New Yorkers never seeing anything of Paris beyond the Rue de la
Paix and the Bois. They would as soon think of going to Cluny or
St. Denis as of visiting the museum in our park!

Such people go to Fontainebleau because they are buying furniture,
and they wish to see the best models. They go to Versailles on the
coach and "do" the Palace during the half-hour before luncheon.
Beyond that, enthusiasm rarely carries them. As soon as they have
settled themselves at the Bristol or the Rhin begins the endless
treadmill of leaving cards on all the people just seen at home, and
whom they will meet again in a couple of months at Newport or Bar
Harbor. This duty and the all-entrancing occupation of getting
clothes fills up every spare hour. Indeed, clothes seem to pervade
the air of Paris in May, the conversation rarely deviating from
them. If you meet a lady you know looking ill, and ask the cause,
it generally turns out to be "four hours a day standing to be
fitted." Incredible as it may seem, I have been told of one plain
maiden lady, who makes a trip across, spring and autumn, with the
sole object of getting her two yearly outfits.

Remembering the hundreds of cultivated people whose dream in life
(often unrealized from lack of means) has been to go abroad and
visit the scenes their reading has made familiar, and knowing what
such a trip would mean to them, and how it would be looked back
upon during the rest of an obscure life, I felt it almost a duty to
"suppress" a wealthy female (doubtless an American cousin of Lady
Midas) when she informed me, the other day, that decidedly she
would not go abroad this spring.