grounds.

It was my cousin Beatrice who was responsible for the change of heart
in me toward womankind. For very soon after she came to live with us,
I noticed that in regard to all other young women I was growing daily
more exacting. I did not admit this to myself, and still less to
Beatrice, because she was most scornful of the girls I knew, and
mocked at them. This was quite unfair of her, because she had no real
acquaintance with them, and knew them only from photographs and
tintypes, of which I had a most remarkable collection, and of what I
chose to tell her about them. I was a good deal annoyed to find that
the stories which appealed to me as best illustrating the character of
each of my friends, only seemed to furnish Beatrice with fresh
material for ridicule, and the girls of whom I said the least were the
ones of whom she approved. The only girls of my acquaintance who also
were friends of hers, were two sisters who lived at Dobbs Ferry, and
whose father owned the greater part of it, and a yacht, in which he
went down to his office every morning. But Beatrice held that my
manner even to them was much too free and familiar, and that she could
not understand why I did not see that it was annoying to them as well.
I could not tell her in my own defence that their manner to me, when
she was with us and when she was not, varied in a remarkable degree.
It was not only girls who carried themselves differently before
Beatrice: every man who met her seemed to try and show her the best in
him, or at least to suppress any thought or act which might displease
her. It was not that she was a prig, or an angel, but she herself was
so fine and sincere, and treated all with such an impersonal and yet
gracious manner that it became contagious, and everybody who met her
imitated the model she unconsciously furnished. I was very much struck
with this when she visited the Academy. Men who before her coming had