it needs,
Willis had chosen his associates in a circle which it was very difficult to
break from, now that their society was no longer essential to him. He was
close in his attention to business; his great, success had arisen from
industry as well as talent; but when the counting-house was closed, there
was no family circle to welcome him, and the doors of the club-house were
invitingly open.

True, it was one of the most respectable clubs of the city, mostly composed
of young business men like himself, who discussed the tariffs and their
effects upon trade over their _recherche_ dinners, and chatted of European
politics over their wine. And this reminds us of one thing that argues
much, if not more than anything else, against the club-house system, that
is so rapidly gaining favor in our cities. It accustoms the young man just
entering life to a surrounding of luxury that he cannot himself
consistently support when he begins to think of having a home of his own.
He passes his evenings in a beautiful saloon, where the light is brilliant,
yet tempered; where crimson curtains and a blazing fire speak at once of
comfort and affluence of means. There are no discomforts, such as any one
meets with more or less, inevitably, in private families--nothing to jar
upon the spirit of self-indulgence and indolence which is thus fostered.
The dinners, in cooking and service, are unexceptionable; and there are
always plenty of associates as idle and thoughtless, and as good-natured,
as himself, to make a jest of domestic life and domestic virtues. And,
by-and-by, there is a stronger stimulus wanted, and the jest becomes more
wanton over the roulette table or the keenly contested rubber; and the wine
circulates more freely as the fire of youth goes out and leaves the ashes
of mental and moral desolation. Ah no! the club-house is no conservator of
the purity of social life, and this Catherine Grant soon felt, as night
after night her husband left her to the society of her own thoughts, or her
favorite books, to meet old friends in its familiar saloons, and show them
that he at least was none the less "a good fellow" for being a married man!

It was all very well, no doubt, to be able to break away from the pleasant
parlor, and the interesting woman who was the presiding genius of his
household, and spend his evenings in the society of gay gallants who talked
of horses and Tedesco's figure, or the gray-headed votaries of the whist
table