ught through them. But the rose and purple tints of richer natures
they cannot give us, and it is not just to them to ask it.

Fashionable society gets at these rich natures very often in a way one
would hardly at first think of. It loves vitality above all things,
sometimes disguised by affected languor, always well kept under by the
laws of good-breeding,--but still it loves abundant life, opulent and
showy organizations,--the spherical rather than the plane trigonometry of
female architecture,--plenty of red blood, flashing eyes, tropical
voices, and forms that bear the splendors of dress without growing pale
beneath their lustre. Among these you will find the most delicious women
you will ever meet,--women whom dress and flattery and the round of city
gayeties cannot spoil,--talking with whom, you forget their diamonds and
laces,--and around whom all the nice details of elegance, which the
cold-blooded beauty next them is scanning so nicely, blend in one
harmonious whole, too perfect to be disturbed by the petulant sparkle of
a jewel, or the yellow glare of a bangle, or the gay toss of a feather.

There are many things that I, personally, love better than fashion or
wealth. Not to speak of those highest objects of our love and loyalty, I
think I love ease and independence better than the golden slavery of
perpetual matinees and soirees, or the pleasures of accumulation.

But fashion and wealth are two very solemn realities, which the frivolous
class of moralists have talked a great deal of silly stuff about.
Fashion is only the attempt to realize Art in living forms and social
intercourse. What business has a man who knows nothing about the
beautiful, and cannot pronounce the word view, to talk about fashion to a
set of people who, if one of the quality left a card at their doors,
would contrive to keep it on the very top of their heap of the names of
their two-story acquaintances, till it was as yellow as the Codex
Vaticanus?

Wealth, too,--what an endless repetition of the same foolish trivialities
about it! Take the single fact of its alleged uncertain tenure and
transitory character. In old times, when men were all the time fighting
and robbing each other,--in those tropical countries where the Sabeans
and the Chaldeans stole all a man's cattle and camels, and there were
frightful tornadoes and rains of fire from heaven, it was true enough
that riches took wings to themselves not unfrequently in a very