high.  They knew that in a marketable point of view there was a frightful glut of women.  The usually small ratio of men was unusually diminished by the absence of those who had gone to the war, and of those who, as was currently reported, were ashamed that they had not gone.  The few available men had it all their own way; the women were on the look-out for them, instead of being themselves looked out for.  They talked about “gentlemen,” and being “companionable to gen-tlemen,” and “who was fascinating to gen-tlemen,” till the “grand old name” became a nuisance.  There was an under-current of unsated coquetry.  I don’t suppose they were any sillier than the rest of us; but when our silliness is mixed in with housekeeping and sewing and teaching and returning visits, it passes off harmless.  When it is stripped of all these modifiers, however, and goes off exposed to Saratoga, and melts in with a hundred other sillinesses, it makes a great show.

No, I don’t like Saratoga.  I don’t think it is wholesome.  No place can be healthy that keeps up such an unmitigated dressing.

“Where do you walk?” I asked an artless little lady.

“Oh, almost always on the long piazza.  It is so clean there, and we don’t like to soil our dresses.”

Now I ask if girls could ever get into that state in the natural course of things!  It is the result of vile habits.  They cease to care for things which they ought to like to do, and they devote themselves to what ought to be only an incident.  People dress in their best without break.  They go to the springs before breakfast in shining raiment, and they go into the parlor after supper in shining raiment, and it is shine, shine, shine, all the way between, and a different shine each time.  You may well suppose that I was like an owl among birds of Paradise, for what little finery I had was in my (eminently) travelling-trunk:  yet, though it was but a dory, compared with the Noah’s arks that drove up every day, I felt, that, if I could only once get inside of it, I could make things fly to some purpose.  Like poor Rabette, I would show the city that the country too could wear clothes!  I never walked down Broadway without seeing a dozen white trunks, and every white trunk that I saw I was fully convinced was mine, if I could only get at it.  By-and-by mine came, and I blossomed.  I arrayed myself for morning, noon, and night, and everything else that came up, and was, as the poet says,—­

    “Prodigious in change,
    And endless in range,”—­

for I would have scorned not to be as good as the best.  The result was, that in three days I touched bottom.  But then we went away, and my reputation was saved.  I don’t believe anybody ever did a larger business on a smaller capital; but I put a bold face on it.  I cherish the hope that nobody suspected I could not go on in that ruinous way all summer,—­I, who in three days had mustered into service every dress and sash and ribbon and rag that I had had in three years or expected to have in three more.  But I never will, if I can help it, hold my head down where other people are holding their heads up.