ained by an
increasing social extravagance that was beyond the requirements of
happiness of home.

THE TENTH MILESTONE

1886

Society life in the big cities of America in 1886 had become a strange
nightmare of extravagance and late hours. It was developing a queer race
of people. Temporarily, the Lenten season stopped the rustle and flash
of toilettes, chained the dancers, and put away the tempting chalice of
social excitement. When Lent came in the society of the big cities of
America was an exhausted multitude. It seemed to me as though two or
three winters of germans and cotillions would be enough to ruin the best
of health. The victims of these strange exhaustions were countless. No
man or woman could endure the wear and tear of social life in America
without sickness and depletion of health. The demands were at war with
the natural laws of the human race.

Even the hour set for the average assembling of a "society event" in
1886 was an outrage. Once it was eight o'clock at night, soon it was
adjourned to nine-thirty, and then to ten, and there were threats that
it would soon be eleven. A gentleman wrote me this way for advice about
his social burden:

"What shall I do? We have many friends, and I am invited out
perpetually. I am on a salary in a large business house in New York. I
am obliged to arise in the morning at seven o'clock, but I cannot get
home from those parties till one in the morning. The late supper and the
excitement leave me sleepless. I must either give up society or give up
business, which is my living. My wife is not willing that I should give
up society, because she is very popular. My health is breaking down.
What shall I do?"

It was not the idle class that wasted their nights at these parties; it
was the business men dragged into the fashions and foibles of the idle,
which made that strange and unique thing we call society in America.

I should have replied to that man that his wife was a fool. If she were
willing to sacrifice his health, and with it her support, for the
greeting and applause of these midnight functions, I pitied him. Let him
lose his health, his business, and his home, and no one would want to
invite him anywhere. All the diamond-backed terrapins at fifty dollars a
dozen which he might be invited to enjoy after that would do him no
harm. Society would drop him so suddenly that it would knock the breath
out of him. The recipe for a man in this predicament, a