is decorated with lace made by a poor bonnetless girl in one town of
Europe, at a time when fashion has declared that it should bloom with
flowers made by a poor shoeless girl in another: it instigates Mrs. C.
to make a friendly call on Mrs. D. for the purpose of exulting over
the inferior style in which her house is furnished: it tempts F. to
overreach his business friend, or to embezzle his employer's money, that
he may live in a house with a brown-stone front and give great dinners
twice a month: and it sustains G. in his own eyes as he sits at F.'s
table stimulating digestion by inward sneers at the vulgar fashion of
the new man's plate or the awkwardness of his attendants: and perhaps,
worse than all, it tempts H. to exhibit his pictures, and Mrs. I. to
exhibit herself, "for the benefit of our charitable institutions," in
order that the one may read fulsome eulogies of his munificence and his
taste, and the other see a critical catalogue of the beauties of her
person and her costume in all the daily papers. Such are the social
benefits of what you call the desire to be a part of the world's beauty.

_Grey._ Far from it! They have no relation to each other. You mistake
the occasion for the cause, the means for the motive. Your alphabet is
in fault. Such a set of vain, frivolous, dishonest, mean, hypocritical,
and insufferably vulgar letters would be turned out of any respectable,
well-bred spelling-book. Vanity, frivolity, dishonesty, meanness,
hypocrisy, and vulgarity can be exhibited in all the affairs of life,
not excepting those whose proper office is to sweeten and to beautify
it; but it does not need all your logical faculty to discover that
there is not, therefore, any connection between a pretty bonnet, or an
elegantly furnished house, and the disposition to snub and sneer at
those who are without them,--between dishonesty and the desire to live
handsomely and hospitably,--between a cultivated taste for the fine arts
and hypocrisy or a vulgar desire for notoriety and consequence.