yellow corset of cross blue
stripes. Around the bosom of the periot was a frill of white
vandyked gauze of the same form covered with black gauze which
hangs in streamers down her back. Her hair behind is a large
braid with a monstrous crooked comb."

We cannot say that the society of the new capital was notable for its
intellect or for the intellectual turn of its activities. John Adams'
daughter declared that it was "quite enough dissipated," and indeed
costly dress, card playing, and dancing seem to have received an undue
amount of society's attention. The Philadelphia belle, Miss Franks,
wrote home: "Here you enter a room with a formal set courtesy, and after
the 'How-dos' things are finished, all a dead calm until cards are
introduced when you see pleasure dancing in the eyes of all the matrons,
and they seem to gain new life; the maidens decline for the pleasure of
making love. Here it is always leap year. For my part I am used to
another style of behavior." And, continues Miss Franks: "They (the
Philadelphia girls) have more cleverness in the turn of the eye than
those of New York in their whole composition." But blunt, old Governor
Livingston, on the other hand, wrote his daughter Kitty that "the
Philadelphia flirts are equally famous for their want of modesty and
want of patriotism in their over-complacence to red coats, who would not
conquer the men of the country, but everywhere they have taken the women
almost without a trial--damm them."[219]

But there can be no doubt that the whirl of life was a little too giddy
in New York, during the last years of the eighteenth century; and that,
as a visiting Frenchman declared: "Luxury is already forming in this
city, a very dangerous class of men, namely, the bachelors, the
extravagance of the women makes them dread marriage."[220] As mentioned
above, there was much card playing among the women, and on the then
fashionable John Street married women sometimes lost as high as $400 in
a single evening of gambling. To some of the older men who had suffered
the hardships of war that the new nation might be born, such frivolity
and extravagance seemed almost a crime, and doubtless these veterans
would have agreed with Governor Livingston when he complained: "My
principal Secretary of State, who is one of my daughters, has gone to
New York to shake her heels at the balls and assemblies of a metropolis
which might be better employed, more studious of ta