nt fresh green leaves. A
lady is such a plant crowned by a beautiful blossom. You have sometimes
seen a plant, a geranium, for instance, which had lost all its leaves,
and yet bore at the top of its crooked stem a cluster of flowers. Such
flowers are not very beautiful. The thrifty plant without a blossom is
more beautiful. Of course my moral is this, that while the term "lady"
does mean something different from "woman," it is only as a crown of
womanhood that it is really significant.

Every girl should try to be a lady, however, and every girl who
sincerely tries will have some measure of success. I remember when I was
a girl, I once said to a high-bred woman, "Do you think, after all, that
Mrs. A. is much of a lady?" She replied so firmly as to crush me for the
time, "One is either a lady or she is not a lady." I supposed she was
right, and that there were no stages on the perilous upward path which
led to being a lady. I have changed my mind now. I think each of us may
have some virtues without having all the virtues. I think with Emerson
that in a society of gentlemen and ladies we shall find no complete
gentleman and no complete lady; and so I say that every girl who tries
to be a lady will have some measure of success. I do not mean that she
should try to be recognized as a lady. If she is one she will probably,
but not certainly, be so recognized. In a small community, where she can
be known personally, she will be sure of her place, but not in a large
town.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, speaking in England, said something to this
effect: "You think we have no classes in America because we have no
titles to distinguish them. But a barbed wire fence is as effectual in
keeping out intruders as one of boards, though you can see the boards
and the barbed wire is invisible."

Why is a barbed wire fence put up in America? Because there is a real
difference between coarse people and refined people, even when both have
the best intentions. To be sure there are other less valid reasons.
There are coarse people whom accident has put among the higher classes,
who make themselves ridiculous by putting up a fence between themselves
and poorer people even when the poor are refined. Nevertheless, there is
a true basis for distinction of classes. Only the distinction is not as
sharp as many would have it. The highly refined and the very coarse have
so little in common that they can never associate with comfort. But the
highly refi