ress by their
faces or their paces, that is called success!"

"Good Americans when they die go to Paris," said Philip, "so says the
oracle. Naughty Americans try it prematurely, and go while they are
alive. Then Paris casts them out, and when they come back, their French
disrepute is their stock in trade."

"I think," said the cheerful Hope, "that it is not quite so bad." Hope
always thought things not so bad. She went on. "I was very dull not
to know what Mrs. Meredith was talking about. Helen Meredith is a
warm-hearted, generous girl, and will not go far wrong, though her
mother is not as wise as she is well-bred. But Kate forgets that the few
hundred people one sees here or at Paris do not represent the nation,
after all."

"The most influential part of it," said Emilia.

"Are you sure, dear?" said her sister. "I do not think they influence
it half so much as a great many people who are too busy to go to either
place. I always remember those hundred girls at the Normal School, and
that they were not at all like Mrs. Meredith, nor would they care to be
like her, any more than she would wish to be like them."

"They have not had the same advantages," said Emilia.

"Nor the same disadvantages," said Hope. "Some of them are not so well
bred, and none of them speak French so well, for she speaks exquisitely.
But in all that belongs to real training of the mind, they seem to me
superior, and that is why I think they will have more influence."

"None of them are rich, though, I suppose," said Emilia, "nor of very
nice families, or they would not be teachers. So they will not be so
prominent in society."

"But they may yet become very prominent in society," said Hope,--"they
or their pupils or their children. At any rate, it is as certain that
the noblest lives will have most influence in the end, as that two and
two make four."

"Is that certain?" said Philip. "Perhaps there are worlds where two and
two do not make just that desirable amount."

"I trust there are," said Aunt Jane. "Perhaps I was intended to be born
in one of them, and that is why my housekeeping accounts never add up."

Here hope was called away, and Emilia saucily murmured, "Sour grapes!"

"Not a bit of it!" cried Kate, indignantly. "Hope might have anything in
society she wishes, if she would only give up some of her own plans, and
let me choose her dresses, and her rich uncles pay for them. Count Posen
told me, only yesterday, that there wa