njust to demand a mature mind in the overgrown boy, it is
useless to hope for delicate tact and social feeling from the parvenu. To
be gracious and at ease with all classes and professions, one must be
perfectly sure of one's own position, and with us few feel this security,
it being based on too frail a foundation, a crisis in the "street" going
a long way towards destroying it.

Of course I am generalizing and doubt not that in many cultivated homes
the right spirit exists, but unfortunately these are not the centres
which give the tone to our "world." Lately at one of the most splendid
houses in this city a young Italian tenor had been engaged to sing. When
he had finished he stood alone, unnoticed, unspoken to for the rest of
the evening. He had been paid to sing. "What more, in common sense,
could he want?" thought the "world," without reflecting that it was
probably not the _tenor_ who lost by that arrangement. It needs a
delicate hand to hold the reins over the backs of such a fine-mouthed
community as artists and singers form. They rarely give their best when
singing or performing in a hostile atmosphere.

A few years ago when a fancy-dress ball was given at the Academy of
Design, the original idea was to have it an artists' ball; the community
of the brush were, however, approached with such a complete lack of tact
that, with hardly an exception, they held aloof, and at the ball shone
conspicuous by their absence.

At present in this city I know of but two hospitable firesides where you
are sure to meet the best the city holds of either foreign or native
talent. The one is presided over by the wife of a young composer, and
the other, oddly enough, by two unmarried ladies. An invitation to a
dinner or a supper at either of these houses is as eagerly sought after
and as highly prized in the great world as it is by the Bohemians, though
neither "salon" is open regularly.

There is still hope for us, and I already see signs of better things.
Perhaps, when my English friend returns in a few years, we may be able to
prove to her that we have found the road to Prague.

No. 11--Social Exiles

Balzac, in his _Comedie Humaine_, has reviewed with a master-hand almost
every phase of the Social World of Paris down to 1850 and Thackeray left
hardly a corner of London High Life unexplored; but so great have been
the changes (progress, its admirers call it,) since then, that, could
Balzac come back to hi