nobody seemed to know, should be presented to her by the hostess.
He wore no shirt-collar,--he had on black gloves,--and was flourishing a
red bandanna handkerchief! Match me this, ye proud children of poverty,
who boast of your paltry sacrifices for each other! Virtue in humble
life! What is that to the glorious self-renunciation of a martyr in
pearls and diamonds? As I saw this noble woman bending gracefully before
the social mendicant,--the white billows of her beauty heaving under
the foam of the traitorous laces that half revealed them,--I should
have wept with sympathetic emotion, but that tears, except as a private
demonstration, are an ill-disguised expression of self-consciousness and
vanity, which is inadmissible in good society.

I have sometimes thought, with a pang, of the position in which
political chance or contrivance might hereafter place some one of
our fellow-citizens. It has happened hitherto, so far as my limited
knowledge goes, that the President of the United States has always been
what might be called in general terms a gentleman. But what if at some
future time the choice of the people should fall upon one on whom that
lofty title could not, by any stretch of charity, be bestowed? This may
happen,--how soon the future only knows. Think of this miserable man
of coming political possibilities,--an unpresentable boor sucked into
office by one of those eddies in the flow of popular sentiment which
carry straws and chips into the public harbor, while the prostrate
trunks of the monarchs of the forest hurry down on the senseless stream
to the gulf of political oblivion! Think of him, I say, and of the
concentrated gaze of good society through its thousand eyes, all
confluent, as it were, in one great burning-glass of ice that shrivels
its wretched object in fiery torture, itself cold as the glacier of an
unsunned cavern! No,--there will be angels of good-breeding then as
now, to shield the victim of free institutions from himself and from his
torturers. I can fancy a lovely woman playfully withdrawing the knife
which he would abuse by making it an instrument for the conveyance
of food,--or, failing in this kind artifice, sacrificing herself by
imitating his use of that implement; how much harder than to plunge it
into her bosom, like Lucretia! I can see her studying in his provincial
dialect until she becomes the Champollion of New England or Western
or Southern barbarisms. She has learned that haow m