two years later, and then proves herself either a success or a failure according to the number of invitations she receives and the frequency with which her dances are cut into at the balls. She is supposed to feel grateful for the sacrifices that are made for her début, and the best way to show it is by becoming engaged when the time is right to a man one rung higher up on the social ladder than she.
I had no mother to guide me through these intricacies. My pilot was my ambitious sister-in-law, Edith, who married Alec when I was fifteen, remodeled our old 240 Main Street, Hilton, Mass., into a very grand and elegant mansion and christened it The Homestead. Hilton used to be just a nice, typical New England city. It had its social ambitions and discontents, I suppose, but no more pronounced than in any community of fifty or sixty thousand people. It was the Summer Colony with its liveried servants, expensive automobiles, and elaborate entertaining that caused such discontent in Hilton.
I've seen perfectly happy and good-natured babies made cross and irritable by putting them into a four-foot-square nursery yard. The wall of wealth and aristocracy around Hilton has had somewhat the same effect upon the people that it confines. If a social barrier of any sort appears upon the horizon of my sister-in-law Edith, she is never happy until she has climbed over it. She was in the very midst of scaling that high and difficult barrier built up about
