unpopular and unfashionable faculty, and men and women play the
Pharisee with a deep sense of their own worthlessness and littleness
gnawing at their spirit all the while.

I had been taught all this in time, and as early as my first vacation
at home, among the fashionable juveniles of my step-mother's circle, I
had begun to submit my valuable precepts to profitable practice. My
first callers taught me a very wholesome lesson which I have held upon
the surface of my memory through all these years.

Whenever I have witnessed a repetition of that early experience, the
past has come forcibly back to me, with all the golden admonitions of
my school-days, and I have felt myself stimulated anew, towards the
steady pursuit of those social virtues which are the outgrowth of
Christian charity, and a generous, impartial discrimination.

I have met many Alice Merivales, since my youth, who cast their
stylish shadows ominously over the lives of many a Florrie Grant, and
I have tried to sustain the weaker one, whenever it was in my power,
the evil, I regret to see, is unabating. A new generation of little
maidens is springing up around us, are they, too, destined to follow
the beaten track their elders have trodden so unworthily? Will they be
taught these nice discriminations between wealth and no wealth? Must
they, too, meet a struggling gentility with a haughty, overbearing
carriage, and elbow out less independent aspirants, whom some
capricious fortune has brought within their contact? Does one little
star in the vault above shine less brightly or twinkle less gladly
because myriads of others do likewise? After all, what vainglory need
there be in accidents of birth or fortune. They are not virtually
ours, they have been given to us, and rest upon a changing wind that,