t-front, and Caroline
Pettitoes wonders at "Mr. Duesseldorf's" industry?

If intelligent people decline to go, you justly remark, it is their own
fault. Yes, but if they stay away, it is very certainly their great
gain. The elderly people are always neglected with us, and nothing
surprises intelligent strangers more than the tyrannical supremacy of
Young America. But we are not surprised at this neglect. How can we be,
if we have our eyes open? When Caroline Pettitoes retreats from the
floor to the sofa, and, instead of a "polker," figures at parties as a
matron, do you suppose that "tough old Joes" like ourselves are going to
desert the young Caroline upon the floor, for Madame Pettitoes upon the
sofa? If the pretty young Caroline, with youth, health, freshness, a
fine, budding form, and wreathed in a semi-transparent haze of flounced
and flowered gauze, is so vapid that we prefer to accost her with our
eyes alone, and not with our tongues, is the same Caroline married into
a Madame Pettitoes, and fanning herself upon a sofa--no longer
particularly fresh, nor young, nor pretty, and no longer budding, but
very fully blown--likely to be fascinating in conversation? We can not
wonder that the whole connection of Pettitoes, when advanced to the
matron state, is entirely neglected. Proper homage to age we can all pay
at home, to our parents and grandparents. Proper respect for some
persons is best preserved by avoiding their neighborhood.

And what, think you, is the influence of this extravagant expense and
senseless show upon these same young men and women? We can easily
discover. It saps their noble ambition, assails their health, lowers
their estimate of men, and their reverence for women, cherishes an eager
and aimless rivalry, weakens true feeling, wipes away the bloom of true
modesty, and induces an ennui, a satiety, and a kind of dilettante
misanthropy, which is only the more monstrous because it is undoubtedly
real. You shall hear young men of intelligence and cultivation, to whom
the unprecedented circumstances of this country offer opportunities of a
great and beneficent career, complaining that they were born within this
blighted circle; regretting that they were not bakers and
tallow-chandlers, and under no obligation to keep up appearances;
deliberately surrendering all the golden possibilities of that future
which this country, beyond all others, holds before them; sighing that
they are not rich enough to ma