ned do not need barbed wire between themselves and those with
one degree less of cultivation. We can always reach one hand to those
below us, and if we reach the other to those above us, we shall be able
to lift the lower to our plane instead of sinking to theirs. Such a
chain of love, reaching from the lowest to the highest, is the ideal
society, and the highest man does not need to lift all his fellows up by
his unaided strength, because there is infinite help above him.

But in the unideal present most of us will sometimes be called upon to
stand outside the charmed circle of barbed wire which incloses more
fortunate mortals, in spite of all we can do for ourselves. We may be
better women than those within the circle, we may be better-educated,
more careful in our habits, and our manners may be finer, and yet we may
not have the magic word which would admit us. There is no doubt, for
instance, that blood and breeding do tell powerfully in refinement. I
can think of half a dozen women, however, of no birth at all in the
ordinary sense, and of no home education, who have blossomed into the
loveliest and most refined of women. In one case, the ancestors had for
generations been earnestly religious, so that the girl was really of
noble birth and predestined to refinement, though she had nothing to
help her in the world's estimation. But some of the girls came from
wretched homes, some of them did not even have good mothers, and one was
the illegitimate daughter of a servant girl. But they all had aspiration
and intellect, and their refinement was not only wonderful under the
circumstances, but wonderful under any circumstances. They were suitable
associates for the most exclusive ladies in our cities so far as genuine
refinement goes, only as their experience of life was much wider than
that of these carefully guarded dames, perhaps they would not have
assimilated very well with them after all.

Of course, the exclusive circles are suspicious of women whose
antecedents are like these, and perhaps they have a right to be
suspicious, because these girls were certainly exceptions to the rule.
At all events, none of us can help ourselves by grasping at a position.
We may, to be sure, get invitations sometimes if we are vulgar enough to
ask for them, but we shall find the barbed wire fence even in the
drawing-room to which we have been admitted. We must be content to stand
outside every circle till we are invited to enter it,