duced circumstances living in retirement; very exclusive, very
haughty. I have counted it a privilege to be constantly associated with
people of such rare distinction. Her mother is a grand dame of the old
school who has opened her home to a few choice paid guests who feel, as
I do, that it is far more refreshing socially to partake of the gracious
hospitality of her secluded home than to live in the noisy, vulgar
hotels of the city. It was in this relation at her mother's home that I
met the woman who is to join her lot with mine." Thereafter followed the
date and place of the wedding, a description of the bride's dress, an
account of her lineage back to the "Revolutionary Georgia Governor of
that name," and fifty cents in stamps for extra papers containing an
account of the wedding.

In time we hope to teach our young men to roll down their shirt-sleeves
in the summer, our girls to wear their hats, our horses to quit prancing
in the shafts of the family buggy. In time bridge whist will wear itself
out, in time our social life will resume its old estate, and the owners
of the five dress-suits in town will return to their former distinction.
In time caste lines set by the advent of the leisure class will be
obliterated, and it will be no longer bad form for the dry-goods clerk
to dance with the grocery clerk's wife at the Charity Ball. But, come
what may, we shall always know that there was a time in the social
history of our town when we danced the two-step as they dance it in
Tiffin, Ohio, and wore knee-breeches and plaid stockings, and quit work
at four o'clock. Those were great days--"the glory that was Greece, the
grandeur that was Rome."

VI

The Bolton Girl's "Position"

When she said she would like to "accept a position" with our paper, it
was all over between us. After that we knew that she was at least highly
improbable if not entirely impossible. But then we might have expected
as much from a girl who called herself Maybelle. There is, however, this
much to be said in Maybelle's favour: she was persistent. She did not
let go till it thundered! We could have stood it well enough if she had
limited her campaign for a job on the paper to an occasional call at the
office. But she had a fiendish instinct which told her who were the
friends we liked most to oblige: the banker, for instance, who carried
our overdrafts, the leading advertiser, the chairman of the printing
committee of the town council--an