n left to whom it still applies.

As Emerson says in his essay upon "Manners:" "Are there not women who
inspire us with courtesy; who unloose our tongues, and we speak; who
anoint our eyes, and we see? We say things we never thought to have
said. For once, our walls of habitual reserve vanished and left us at
large; we were children playing with children in a wide field of
flowers. Steep us, we cried, in these influences for days, for weeks,
and we shall be sunny poets and write out in many colored words the
romance that you are."

The successful society woman has a genius for leadership. She molds
and makes what she will of her surroundings. She undervalues the
talents of no one; she rather draws out and makes the most of every
one with whom she comes in contact.

She is quiet, she is reposeful, she has the tact that puts every one
with whom she meets at ease, and, above all, she is sympathetic. A
judiciously expressed sympathy with our fellow-beings is one of the
highest attributes of our nature.

"Unite sympathy to observation and the dead spring to life." It is
tact to so express that sympathy as not to seem aware of the weakness
that we would support and conceal from others. Madame Recamier had
this gift of hidden sympathy, this power of drawing out the best that
was in those who approached her. To this gift it was that she owed
that power over all men which survived her wonderful beauty.

A Sympathetic Nature.

It was not her wit, for with this she was not so greatly endowed; it
was not alone her beauty, for the eminent men and women of the day
followed her when, blind and poor, she sought the solitude of the
abbey; but it was the delicate tendrils of her sympathy and the
steadfastness of her friendship that drew towards her all hearts, and
molded and welded her company of followers into one of the most
perfect and powerful social circles that has ever surrounded any
society leader.

Many an awkward situation has been saved by feminine tact. There was
the cabinet-member's wife who drank out of her finger-bowl because her
guest, a senator, had done so. And the general's wife who, when a
clumsy tea drinker smashed a priceless cup, picked up another of the
fragile affairs and crushed it between her fingers with a "They do
break easily, don't they?" And the woman who, when M. Blanc was
mistaken at an English garden party for a page, replied, "Well, M.
Blanc is a page--of history."

This tact is in great m