bbles brighter than
those of its neighbors, and christens them "society."

It is an unceasing wonder to a thoughtful person, at any such resort, to
see the unconscious way in which fashionable society accepts the foam, and
ignores the currents. You hear people talk of "a position in society," "the
influential circles in society," as if the position they mean were not
liable to be shifted in a day; as if the essential influences in America
were not mainly to be sought outside the world of fashion. In other
countries it is very different. The circle of social caste, whose centre
you touch in London, radiates to the farthest shores of the British empire;
the upper class controls, not merely fashion, but government; it rules in
country as well as city; genius and wealth are but its tributaries.
Wherever it is not so, it is because England is so far Americanized. But in
America the social prestige of the cities is nothing in the country; it is
a matter of the pavement, of a three-mile radius.

Go to the farthest borders of England: there are still the "county
families," and you meet servants in livery. On the other hand, in a little
village in northern New Hampshire, my friend was visited in the evening by
the landlady, who said that several of their "most fashionable ladies" had
happened in, and she would like to show them her guest's bonnet. Then the
different cities ignore each other: the rulers of select circles in New
York may find themselves nobodies in Washington, while a Washington social
passport counts for as little in New York. Boston and Philadelphia affect
to ignore both; and St. Louis and San Francisco have their own standards.
The utmost social prestige in America is local, provincial, a matter of the
square inch: it is as if the foam of each particular beach along the
seacoast were to call itself "society."

There is something pathetic, therefore, in the unwearied pains taken by
ambitious women to establish a place in some little, local, transitory
domain, to "bring out" their daughters for exhibition on a given evening,
to form a circle for them, to marry them well. A dozen years hence the
millionaires whose notice they seek may be paupers, or these ladies may be
dwelling in some other city, where the visiting cards will bear wholly
different names. How idle to attempt to transport into American life the
social traditions and delusions which require monarchy and primogeniture,
and a standing army, to keep t