. What did she buy there?"

"Oh, a fiddlestick!" exclaimed the general. "Why don't you keep quiet
and listen to my story? I say, she went into a great dry-goods store in
New York, as sales-woman."

"Bless my soul! You don't mean a shop-girl?"

"That's what I said, isn't it? And why not?"

"Oh, well!--but, shade of Susan Brown! Ichabod!--what is the feminine of
Ichabod, by the way, Trednoke? But, seriously, it's too bad. Susan may
have been fickle, but she was always aristocratic. And now her daughter
is a shop-girl. You and I are avenged!"

"You are just as ridiculous, Meschines, as you were thirty or fifty
years ago," said the general, tranquilly. "You declaim for the sake
of hearing your own voice. Besides, what you say is un-American. Grace
Parsloe, as I was saying, got a place as shop-girl in one of the great
New York stores. I don't say she mightn't have done worse: what I say
is, I doubt whether she could have done better. That house--I know one
of its founders, and I know what I'm talking about--is like an enormous
family, where children are born, year after year, grow up, and take
their places in life according to their quality and merit. What I mean
is, that the boy who drives a wagon for them to-day, at three dollars
a week, may control one of their chief departments, or even become a
partner, before they're done with him; and, mutatis mutandis, the same
with the girls. When these girls marry, it's apt to be into a higher
rank of life than they were born in; and that fact, I take it, is a good
indication that their shop-girl experience has been an education and an
improvement. They are given work to do, suited to their capacity, be it
small or great; they are in the way of learning something of the great
economic laws; they learn self-restraint, courtesy, and----"

"And human nature! Yes, poor things: they see the American buying-woman,
and that is a discipline more trying than any you West Pointers know
about! Oh, yes, I see your point. If the fathers of the big family ARE
fathers, and the children ARE children to them... All the same, I fancy
the young ladies, when they marry into the higher social circles, as
you say they do, don't, as a rule, make their shop girl days a topic of
conversation at five-o'clock teas, or put 'Ex-shop-girl to So-and-so' at
the bottom of their visiting-cards."

"I believe, after all, you're a snob, Meschines," said the general,
pensively. "But, as I was about to say, when