l and right one. A few hearts may suffer accidental, transient
injury; but hearts are like limbs, all the stronger for being broken.
Besides, where one man or woman is injured by loving too much, nine
hundred and ninety-nine die the death from not loving enough.

But these Saratoga girls did neither one thing nor another. They dressed
themselves in their best, making a point of it, and failed. They assembled
themselves together of set purpose to be lively, and they were
infectiously dismal. They did not dress well: one looked rustic; another
was dowdyish; a third was over-fine; a fourth was insignificant. Their
bearing was not good, in the main. They danced, and whispered, and
laughed, and looked like milkmaids. They had no style, no figure. Their
shoulders were high, and their chests were flat, and they were one-sided,
and they stooped,--all of which would have been of no account, if they had
only been unconsciously enjoying themselves; but they consciously were
not. It is possible that they thought they were happy, but I knew better.
You are never happy, unless you are master of the situation; and they were
not. They endeavored to appear at ease,--a thing which people who are at
ease never do. They looked as if they had all their lives been meaning to
go to Saratoga, and now they had got there and were determined not to
betray any unwontedness. It was not the timid, eager, delighted,
fascinating, graceful awkwardness of a new young girl; it was not the
careless, hearty, whole-souled enjoyment of an experienced girl; it was
not the natural, indifferent, imperial queening it of an acknowledged
monarch: but something that caught hold of the hem of the garment of them
all. It was they with the sheen damped off. So it was not imposing. I
could pick you up a dozen girls straight along, right out of the pantries
and the butteries, right up from the washing-tubs and the sewing-machines,
who should be abundantly able to "hoe their row" with them anywhere. In
short, I was extremely disappointed. I expected to see the high fashion,
the very birth and breeding, the cream cheese of the country, and it was
skim-milk. If that is birth, one can do quite as well without being born
at all. Occasionally you would see a girl with gentle blood in her veins,
whether it were butcher-blood or banker-blood, but she only made the
prevailing plebsiness more striking. Now I maintain that a woman ought to
be very handsome or very clever, or else sh