he curtain to rise; then who honestly, devotedly,
straightforwardly, goes through the whole comedy.

In everything I hate imitations. If I cannot get the real article, I do
without it.

CHAPTER XXXV

WHAT IS A PERFECT LADY?

'Am I the man as wants a gentleman to drive him?'--How can you tell
a lady?--A lady is a woman who adds to the virtues of a woman the
qualities of a gentleman.

In a clever article, Lady Violet Greville recently asked, 'What is a
lady?'

A friend of mine was once asked in New York by a coachman if he was
'the man as wanted a gentleman to drive him.'

I was myself told once by a negro hotel-porter, whom I had asked a
question about some baggage of mine, to apply 'to that gen'l'man over
there'--another negro porter.

A lady friend of mine who visits the poor of her district once called
at a tenement house to inquire after a poor woman who was ill. The
woman who answered the door shouted to someone upstairs: 'Will you tell
the lady on the second floor that a young person from the district has
called to see her?'

A lady acquaintance, who once happened to be alone in her home with a
maid who was ill, out of consideration for that girl, went herself to
open the door to a friend she had seen go up the steps of her house, so
as to save the maid the trouble of coming upstairs. The following day
that maid told a servant next door that 'her mistress was no lady,' as
she answered her door herself.

'What is a lady?' asks Lady Violet Greville.

Well, it is hard to tell in these democratic days, when every class
strives to ape the others above, when all people are equal to their
superiors and superior to their equals.

With the modern extravagance in dress, the boisterous hats, the
outrageously _decollete_ dresses in restaurants and other public
places, the cigarette-smoking, the card-playing for high stakes, and
what not, I shall feel inclined to answer: 'You can tell a lady by the
efforts she makes to be taken for--anything but a lady.'

Every class of society has its own definition of a lady. To the
inhabitants of the slums it is a woman who stops her nose when in
contact with them; to servants, it is one who does not do a stroke of
work in her house, pays their wages regularly, throws at them her
left-off clothes, and treats them like dirt; to tradespeople, it is one
who pays cash for what she buys; for dressmakers and milliners, it is a
woman who never bargains, and is