e Cristo, and make his hero, riddled and stung by assaults of our
unbridled press, find but a single means of vengeance. That means
would be the starting of a great newspaper on his own account, and the
triumphant cannonading of his foes through its columns. More
influential New York editors would doubtless already have forced their
way within the holy bounds of patrician circles, were it not that, in
the first place editors are somewhat hard-worked persons, and that in
the second place they are usually men of brains.

Marriage, among the New York snobs and plutocrats, ordinarily treats
human affection as though it were a trifling optic malady to be cured
by a few drops of corrective lotion. Daughters are trained by their
mothers to leave no efforts untried, short of those absolutely
immoral, in winning wealthy husbands. Usually the daughters are
tractable enough. Rebellion is rare with them; why should it not be?
Almost from infancy (unless when their parents have made fortunes with
prodigious quickness) they are taught that matrimony is a mere hard
bargain, to be driven shrewdly and in a spirit of the coolest
mercantile craft. Sometimes they do really rebel, however, mastered by
pure nature, in one of those tiresome moods where she shows the
insolence of defying bloodless convention. Yet nearly always
capitulation follows. And then what follows later on? Perhaps
heart-broken resignation, perhaps masked adultery, perhaps the
degradation of public divorce. But usually it is no worse than a
silent disgusted slavery, for the American woman is notoriously cold
in all sense of passion, and when reared to respect "society" she is a
snob to the core. Some commentators aver that it is the climate which
makes her so pulseless and prudent. This is possible. But one deeply
familiar with the glacial theories of the fashionable New York mother
might find an explanation no less frigid than comprehensive for all
her traits of acquiescence and decorum. How many of these fashionable
mothers ask more than a single question of the bridegrooms they desire
for their daughters? That one question is simply: "What amount of
money do you control?" But constantly this kind of interrogation is
needless. A male "match" and "catch" finds that his income is known to
the last dollar long before he has been graduated from the senior
class at Columbia or Harvard. Society, like a genial feminine
Briaraeus, opens to him its myriad rosy and dimpled arms.