gilded
youth has been surely the worst symptom. With his airs of young milord,
his fast horses, his gold and silver cigarette-cases, his clothes from
a New York tailor, his recklessness of money showered upon him by
indulgent mothers or doting grandfathers, he respects nothing and
nobody. He is blase if you please. Watch him at a social function how
condescendingly he deigns to select a partner for the popular waltz or
two step how carelessly he shoulders older people out of his way, with
what a blank stare he returns the salutation of some old acquaintance
whom he may choose in his royal whim to forget! The unpleasant part
of all this is that the young women he so condescendingly selects as
partners for the dance greet him with seeming rapture, though in their
hearts they must feel humiliated by his languid hauteur, and many older
people beam upon him almost fawningly if he unbends so far as to throw
them a careless, disdainful word!

One wonders what has come over the new generation. Of such as these the
Republic was not made. Let us pray that the future of our country is
not in the hands of these fin-de-siecle gilded youths, but rather in the
calloused palms of young men yet unknown, labouring upon the farms of
the land. When we compare the young manhood of Abraham Lincoln with the
specimens we are now producing, we see too well that it bodes ill for
the twentieth century--

George yawned, and tossed the clipping into his waste-basket, wondering
why his aunt thought such dull nonsense worth the sending. As for her
insinuation, pencilled upon the border, he supposed she meant to joke--a
supposition which neither surprised him nor altered his lifelong opinion
of her wit.

He read her letter with more interest:

The dinner your mother gave for the Morgans was a lovely affair. It was
last Monday evening, just ten days after you left. It was peculiarly
appropriate that your mother should give this dinner, because her
brother George, your uncle, was Mr. Morgan's most intimate friend before
he left here a number of years ago, and it was a pleasant occasion for
the formal announcement of some news which you heard from Lucy Morgan
before you returned to college. At least she told me she had told you
the night before you left that her father had decided to return here to
live. It was appropriate that your mother, herself an old friend, should
assemble a representative selection of Mr. Morgan's old friends around
him at s