main at home.

He would soon begin to perceive that New York society is a blending of
the ludicrous and pathetic. The really charming women have two
terrible faults, one which their fathers, husbands, and brothers have
taught them, and one which they have apparently contracted without
extraneous aid. The first is their worship of wealth, their devout
genuflection before it as the sole choicest gift which fate can
bestow, and the second is their merciless and metallic snobbery. They
have made a god of caste, and in a country where, of all other cults,
that of caste is the most preposterous. The men (the real grown-up
men, who may hate the big balls, but are nevertheless a great deal in
the movement as regards other gay pastimes) watch them with quiet
approbation. Many a New York husband is quite willing that his wife
shall cut her own grandmother if that relative be not "desirable." The
men have not time to preen their social plumes quite so strenuously;
they are too busy in money-getting, and of a sort which nearly always
concerns the hazard of the Wall Street die. And yet quite a number of
the men are arrant snobs, refusing to associate with, often even to
notice, others whose dollars count fewer than their own. This form of
plutocratic self-adulation is relatively modern. It is called by some
people a very inferior state of things to that which existed in "the
good old Knickerbocker days." But the truth is, odious though the
millionnaire's ascendancy may be at present, that of the Knickerbocker
was once hardly less so. Vulgar, brassy, and intolerable the
"I'm-better-than-you" strut and swagger of plutocracy surely is; but
in the smug, pert provincialism of those former New York autocrats who
defined as "family" their descent of two or three generations from raw
Dutch immigrants, there was very little comfort indeed. The present
writer has seen something of this element; in the decade from 1865 to
1875 it was still extremely active. Society was then governed by the
Knickerbocker, as it is now governed by the plutocrat, and in either
instance the rule has been wholly deplorable. Indeed, for one cogent
reason, if no other, poor New York stands to-day as the least
fortunate of all great cities. Her society, from the time she ceased
to admit herself a village up to the date at which these lines are
written, has never been even faintly worthy of the name. A few years
ago the "old residents," with their ridiculous claims to