ing very pretty and quite charming she will
marry, no doubt, although she refuses to nurse men. But there are
always the visiting doctors, the internes, and the unattached men in
households, where in the most seductive of all garbs, she remains for
weeks at a time.

In fact nearly all nurses are pretty. I wonder why?

The hospital nurses during the day arrived at intervals to take my
temperature, give me detestable nourishment, or bring me flowers or a
telephone message. It certainly never occurred to me to pity any of
them, and when they lingered to talk they entertained me with pleasant
pictures of their days off. They struck me as being able to enjoy life
very keenly, possibly because of being in a position to appreciate its
contrasts.

I know the daughter of a wealthy and historic family, whose head--he
is precisely the type of the elderly, cold-blooded, self-righteous,
self-conscious New York aristocrat of the stage--will not permit her
to gratify her desire to write for publication, "for," saith he, "I do
not wish to see my honored name on the back of works of fiction."

I do not think, myself, that he has deprived the world of one more
author, for if she had fiction in her brain-cells no parental dictum
could keep it confined within the walls of her skull; but the point is
that being a young woman of considerable energy and mental activity,
she found mere society unendurable and finally persuaded her father to
make her one of his secretaries. She learned not only stenography and
typewriting but telegraphy. There is a private apparatus in their
Newport home for her father's confidential work, and this she
manipulates with the skill of a professional. If the fortunes of her
family should go to pieces, she could find a position and support
herself without the dismal and health-racking transition which is the
fate of so many unfortunate girls suddenly bereft and wholly
unprepared.

III

The snobbishness of this old gentleman is by no means a prerogative of
New York's "old families." One finds it in every class of American men
above the industrial. In Honore Willsie's novel, _Lydia of the Pines,_
an American novel of positive value, the father was a day laborer, as
a matter of a fact (although of good old New England farming stock),
earning a dollar and a half a day, and constantly bemoaning the fact;
yet when "young Lydia," who was obliged to dress like a scarecrow,
wished to earn her own pin-money by mak