time they were twelve, and their later coming out changed
little the mode of life to which they had been accustomed for several
years before it. The result of their mother's watchful care and
self-sacrifice is that these two young ladies could not possibly be
happy, or even comfortable, if they married men unable to furnish them
with French maids, motors, constant amusement, gay society, travel and
Paris clothes.

Without these things they would wither away and die like flowers
deprived of the sun. They are physically unfit to be anything but the
wives of millionaires--and they will be the wives of millionaires or
assuredly die unmarried. But, as the circle of rich young men of their
acquaintance is more or less limited their chances of matrimony are by
no means bright, albeit that they are the pivots of a furious whirl of
gaiety which never stops.

No young man with an income of less than twenty thousand a year would
have the temerity to propose to either of them. Even on twenty thousand
they would have a hard struggle to get along; it would mean the most
rigid economy--and, if there were babies, almost poverty.

Besides, when girls are living in the luxury to which mine are
accustomed they think twice before essaying matrimony at all. The
prospects of changing Newport, Palm Beach, Paris, Rome, Nice and
Biarritz for the privilege of bearing children in a New York apartment
house does not allure, as in the case of less cosmopolitan young ladies.
There must be love--plus all present advantages! Present advantages
withdrawn, love becomes cautious.

Even though the rich girl herself is of finer clay than her parents and,
in spite of her artificial environment and the false standards by which
she is surrounded, would like to meet and perhaps eventually marry some
young man who is more worth while than the "pet cats" of her
acquaintance, she is practically powerless to do so. She is cut off by
the impenetrable artificial barrier of her own exclusiveness. She may
hear of such young men--young fellows of ambition, of adventurous
spirit, of genius, who have already achieved something in the world, but
they are outside the wall of money and she is inside it, and there is no
way for them to get in or for her to get out. She is permitted to know
only the _jeunesse doree_--the fops, the sports, the club-window men,
whose antecedents are vouched for by the Social Register.

She has no way of meeting others. She does not know wh