This is my third winter out and, to quote mamma, no prospects, no prospects!  Of course, I am nothing of a belle, nothing of a social queen among women.  This is a source of endless mortification to mamma.  But there is no reason why it should be so, because a belle in this town is a lost art.  Lost in the days of the brilliant Bettie V. and the beautiful Alice B. Nowadays belleship is like statesmanship, the honors are divided.  We have plenty of real pretty women, but no startling beauties.  There is not a girl in my set but who is fully up to the average in appearance, manners, mind.  Competition may do well enough for trade, but it does not produce any one reigning belle in social circles.  So I am not entirely to blame; the causes which work against me also work against others.  I go to the utmost limit, and sometimes beyond.  I do every thing which my better nature will license—­often a great deal besides.  My opportunities are excellent.  I am invited every where, because we belong to a highly respectable and somewhat ancient family (we have a beautiful family-tree, arranged by mamma before I was grown); and I go every where, even when I am forced to go with papa, which, I am glad to say, is never more than twice in one season.

Papa is really a dear, good man.  He has not only the love but also the pity of a devoted daughter, for he does have such a hard time with mamma.  While he understands perfectly all about making money, and just lots of it, too, yet, papa does not shine in mamma’s fashionable circle.  He is a slave to her slightest whim—­and she is full of them.  He is ready, and always, to do her most capricious bidding.  Yet they are not congenial; I am positive she never loved him.  He was, even when they married, counted among the rich men of the community.  And she—­she was the youngest child in a large family, with high notions and small income.  But he is devoted to her!  She may not be lovable, but she is magnetic.  She forces homage from all, devotion from many.  But she is an evil magnet; and she is conscious of her power, which she wields in a high-handed and a most unscrupulous manner.  Unlike most women of the fashionable world, she makes a decided point of poor papa’s attendance.  He must always go with her—­and he does.  Often he comes to his home tired out, worn down to the very quick—­making money he calls it—­and mamma, fresh and ready, eager for the social battle which, like a war-horse, she scents from afar, drags him out with her—­somewhere—­generally, when there is nothing more exciting on hand, across the way to that bric-a-brac-shop of a house, where the tawdry elegant, always weary Mrs. Babbington Brooks holds forth in an ultra-aesthetic style peculiarly her own.  There they spend the entire evening in what mamma softly calls “a sweet communion of congenial souls,” which, being translated according to methods of the earth, earthy, means simply a tiresome time over cards, the constant sipping of a pale pink stuff which foams—­dissipated looking, but harmless.  This they drink out of dainty little cups somewhat larger than a thimble.  “Fragile art gems,” to quote Mrs. Babbington Brooks, “which I was so wildly fortunate as to find in a curiously jolly shop somewhere about Venice, the last time I was over on the other side.  Ah! how I do love Venice!”