Totally ignorant of what she is doing or the essential character of the means she is employing, she runs wild and soon earns an unenviable reputation, which she either cannot live down or which she feels obliged to live up to in order to satisfy her craving for attention.  Many a girl has gone wrong simply because she felt that it was up to her to make good her reputation for caring nothing for the proprieties.

As against an increasing looseness in talk and conduct, it is interesting to note that heavy drinking is clearly going out of fashion in smart society.  There can be no question as to that.  My champagne bills are not more than a third of what they were ten years ago.  I do not attribute this particularly to the temperance movement.  But, as against eight quarts of champagne for a dinner of twenty—­which used to be about my average when we first began entertaining in New York—­three are now frequently enough.  I have watched the butler repeatedly at large dinner parties as he passed the wine and seen him fill only four or five glasses.

Women rarely drink at all.  About one man in three takes champagne.  Of course he is apt to drink whisky instead, but by no means the same amount as formerly.  If it were not for the convention requiring sherry, hock, champagne and liquors to be served the modern host could satisfy practically all the serious liquid requirements of his guests with a quart bottle of Scotch and a siphon of soda.  Claret, Madeira, sparkling Moselles and Burgundies went out long ago.  The fashion that has taught women self-control in eating has shown their husbands the value of abstinence.  Unfortunately I do not see in this a betterment in morals, but mere self-interest—­which may or may not be the same thing, according to one’s philosophy.  If a man drinks nowadays he drinks because he wants to and not to be a good fellow.  A total abstainer finds himself perfectly at home anywhere.

Of course the fashionables, if they are going to set the pace, have to hit it up in order to head the procession.  The fastness of the smart set in England is notorious, and it is the same way in France, Russia, Italy, Germany, Scandinavia—­the world over; and as society tends to become unified mere national boundaries have less significance.  The number of Americans who rent houses in London and Paris, and shooting boxes in Scotland, is large.

Hence the moral tone of Continental society and of the English aristocracy is gradually becoming more and more our own.  But with this difference—­that, as the aristocracy in England and Continental Europe is a separate caste, a well-defined order, having set metes and bounds, which considers itself superior to the rest of the population and views it with indifference, so its morals are regarded as more or less its own affair, and they do not have a wide influence on the community at large.