basal
facts are concerned might have been written by the writer of 'Our Best
Society' and the other _Potiphar Papers_. The temperament varies from
book to book; Mr. Ralph Pulitzer has a neater and lighter touch than
George William Curtis; his book is more compact, more directly and
distinctly a study, and it is less alloyed with the hopes of society
reform which could be more reasonably indulged fifty-six years ago. Do
you remember when 'Our Best Society' came out in the eldest _Putnam's
Magazine_, that phoenix of monthlies which has since twice risen from
its ashes? Don't pretend that our common memory doesn't run back to the
year 1853! We have so many things in common that I can't let you
disgrace the firm by any such vain assumption of extreme youth!"

"Why should we assume it? The Easy Chair had then been three years
firmly on its legs, or its rockers, and the succession of great spirits,
now disembodied, whom its ease invited, were all more or less in mature
flesh. We remember that paper on 'Our Best Society' vividly, and we
recall the shock that its facts concerning the Upper Ten Thousand of New
York imparted to the innocent, or at least the virtuous, Lower Twenty
Millions inhabiting the rest of the United States. Do you mean to say
that the Four Hundred of this day are no better than the Ten Thousand of
that? Has nothing been gained for quality by that prodigious reduction
in quantity?"

"On the contrary, the folly, the vanity, the meanness, the
heartlessness, the vulgarity, have only been condensed and concentrated,
if we are to believe Mr. Pulitzer; and I don't see why we should doubt
him. Did you say you hadn't seen his very shapely little study? It
takes, with all the unpitying sincerity of a kodak, the likeness of our
best society in its three most characteristic aspects; full-face at
dinner, three-quarters-face at the opera, and profile at a ball, where
proud beauty hides its face on the shoulder of haughty commercial or
financial youth, and moneyed age dips its nose in whatever symbolizes
the Gascon wine in the paternal library. Mr. Pulitzer makes no attempt
at dramatizing his persons. There is no ambitious Mrs. Potiphar with a
longing for fashionable New York worlds to conquer, yet with a secret
heartache for the love of her country girlhood; no good, kind, sordid
Potiphar bewildered and bedevilled by the surroundings she creates for
him; no soft Rev. Cream Cheese, tenderly respectful of Mammon while
ri