“Oh!  I don’t know, my dear; you must ask your father.  He is very unwilling to go abroad.”

“Papa is so slow and conservative in his notions!” said the young lady.  “For my part, I cannot see what is the use of all this talk about the Follingsbees.  He is good-natured and funny; and, I am sure, I think she’s a splendid woman:  and, by the way, she gave me the address of lots of places in New York where we can get French things.  Did you notice her lace?  It is superb; and she told me where lace just like it could be bought one-third less than they sell at Stewart’s.”

Thus we see how the starting-out of an old, respectable family in any new ebullition of fancy and fashion is like a dandelion going to seed.  You have not only the airy, fairy globe; but every feathery particle thereof bears a germ which will cause similar feather bubbles all over the country; and thus old, respectable grass-plots become, in time, half dandelion.  It is to be observed that, in all questions of life and fashion, “the world and the flesh,” to say nothing of the third partner of that ancient firm, have us at decided advantage.  It is easy to see the flash of jewelry, the dazzle of color, the rush and glitter of equipage, and to be dizzied by the babble and gayety of fashionable life; while it is not easy to see justice, patience, temperance, self-denial.  These are things belonging to the invisible and the eternal, and to be seen with other eyes than those of the body.

Then, again, there is no one thing in all the items which go to make up fashionable extravagance, which, taken separately and by itself, is not in some point of view a good or pretty or desirable thing; and so, whenever the forces of invisible morality begin an encounter with the troops of fashion and folly, the world and the flesh, as we have just said, generally have the best of it.

It may be very shocking and dreadful to get money by cheating and lying; but when the money thus got is put into the forms of yachts, operas, pictures, statues, and splendid entertainments, of which you are freely offered a share if you will only cultivate the acquaintance of a sharper, will you not then begin to say, “Everybody is going, why not I?  As to countenancing Dives, why he is countenanced; and my holding out does no good.  What is the use of my sitting in my corner and sulking?  Nobody minds me.”  Thus Dives gains one after another to follow his chariot, and make up his court.

Our friend John, simply by being a loving, indulgent husband, had come into the position, in some measure, of demoralizing the public conscience, of bringing in luxury and extravagance, and countenancing people who really ought not to be countenanced.  He had a sort of uneasy perception of this fact; yet, at each particular step, he seemed to himself to be doing no more than was right or reasonable.  It was a fact that, through all Springdale, people were beginning to be uneasy and uncomfortable in houses that used to seem to them nice enough, and ashamed of a style of dress and entertainment and living that used to content them perfectly, simply because of the changes of style and living in the John-Seymour mansion.