gave rise to the following short
conversation, on the very morning of the day she gave the party, to
which we are now conducting the reader.

"How do you know, my dear, that any one does think himself our
_better_?" demanded the husband.

"Why do they not all visit us then!"

"Why do you not visit everybody yourself? A pretty household we
should have, if you did nothing but visit every one who lives even in
this street!"

"You surely would not have _me_ visiting the grocers' wives at the
corners, and all the other rubbish of the neighbourhood. What I mean
is that all the people of a certain sort ought to visit all the other
people of a certain sort, in the same town."

"You surely will make an exception, at least on account of numbers. I
saw number three thousand six hundred and fifty this very day on a
cart, and if the wives of all these carmen should visit one another,
each would have to make ten visits daily in order to get through with
the list in a twelvemonth."

"I have always bad luck in making you comprehend these things, Mr.
Jarvis."

"I am afraid, my dear, it is because you do not very clearly
comprehend them yourself. You first say that everybody ought to visit
everybody, and then you insist on it, _you_ will visit none but those
you think good enough to be visited by Mrs. Jared Jarvis."

"What I mean is, that no one in New-York has a right to think
himself, or herself, better than ourselves."

"Better?--In what sense better?"

"In such a sense as to induce them to think themselves too good to
visit us."

"That may be your opinion, my dear, but others may judge differently.
You clearly think yourself too good to visit Mrs. Onion, the grocer's
wife, who is a capital woman in her way; and how do we know that
certain people may not fancy we are not quite refined enough for
them? Refinement is a positive thing, Mrs. Jarvis, and one that has
much more influence on the pleasures of association than money. We
may want a hundred little perfections that escape our ignorance, and
which those who are trained to such matters deem essentials."

"I never met with a man of so little social spirit, Mr. Jarvis!
Really, you are quite unsuited to be a citizen of a republican
country."

"Republican!--I do not really see what republican has to do with the
question. In the first place, it is a droll word for _you_ to use in
this sense at least; for, taking your own meaning of the term, you
are as anti-republican