and opera-parties and dances were given

'To bless and never to ban.'"

"Very likely, on the low society level on which our joint life moved,"
our other self replied, with his unsparing candor. "You know we were a
country village, city-of-the-second-class personality. Even in the
distant epoch painted in the _Potiphar Papers_ the motives of New York
society were the same as now. It was not the place where birth and rank
and fame relaxed or sported, as in Europe, or where ardent innocence
played and feasted as in the incorrupt towns of our interior. If Curtis
once represented it rightly, it was the same ridiculous, hard-worked,
greedy, costly, stupid thing which Mr. Pulitzer again represents it."

"And yet," we mused aloud, "this is the sort of thing which the
'unthinking multitude' who criticise, or at least review, books are
always lamenting that our fiction doesn't deal with. Why, in its
emptiness and heaviness, its smartness and dulness, it would be the
death of our poor fiction!"

"Well, I don't know," our counterpart responded. "If our fiction took it
on the human ground, and ascertained its inner pathos, its real
lamentableness, it might do a very good thing with those clubmen and
society girls and _grandes dames_. But that remains to be seen. In the
mean time it is very much to have such a study of society as Mr.
Pulitzer has given us. For the most part it is 'satire with no pity in
it,' but there's here and there a touch of compassion, which moves the
more because of its rarity. When the author notes that here and there a
pretty dear finds herself left with no one to take her out to supper at
the ball, his few words wring the heart. 'These poor victims of their
sex cannot, like the men, form tables of their own. All that each can do
is to disappear as swiftly and as secretly as possible, hurrying home in
humiliation for the present and despair for the future.'"

"Do such cruel things really happen in our best society?" we palpitated,
in an anguish of sympathy.

"Such things and worse," our other self responded, "as when in the
german the fair debutante sees the leader advancing toward her with a
splendid and costly favor, only to have him veer abruptly off to bestow
it on some fat elderling who is going to give the next ball. But Mr.
Pulitzer, though he has these spare intimations of pity, has none of the
sentiment which there is rather a swash of in the _Potiphar Papers_.
It's the difference between t