Any thing can be readily organized in this town, but to keep it going is a different matter and a desperate hard thing to do after the novelty wears off.  But mamma seldom allows any of her organizations to die a natural death.  Her present venture, of a literary nature, is thriving; it has grown to be the idle fashion of the social hour.  Mamma alternates with her always coadjutor, Mrs. Babbington Brooks, in entertaining the motley, and somewhat cultured crowd.  Mamma, First Director and Chief Manager; Mrs. Babbington Brooks, Second Director and Most Worthy Assistant.  This “Culture-Seeking Club” (its name) has been organized, mamma says, on my account.  It is her last effort in my behalf.  She has always opposed the idea of my forming an alliance with a poor, petty young lawyer; but she has grown desperate, and organized this club in order that I might, or rather she, angle for some rising young barrister with brains, and a promise of something better than the usual fulfillment—­poverty.  It is a positive tragedy, this being calculatingly thrown at the head of a so-called desirable young man!

Nominally I am a member of the “Culture-Seeking Club,” but actually and at heart I am a Philistine out and out.  This pernicious high-art and culture-seeking fever has never caught my practical soul in its relentless grasp.  I love not the ways of the social aesthete.  Gleams and shadows do not thrill me; sunflowers and daisies do not gratify my hungry soul—­or self.  Mamma says I am not sufficiently clever to tempt the brainy monster, i.e., Culture Fiend.  She has taken me in hand; I am to play a role also.  She has a strange power over me which I am unable to withstand.  It is the fatal power which a strong mind gets over the more weak and readily yielding mind incapable of a successful resistance.  She is a woman with a bad heart and a clear head.  I am irresolute, full of most excellent intentions, and in effect as bad as she without the redeeming features of extraordinary cleverness.  I am to play the role of a young maiden with an object in life.  I am to be full of a new desire to grapple with the weighty problems of the moment.  I am to be carefully coached for each club meeting; I am to be veneered with a thin skin of glittering knowledge.  I am, indeed, bewildered, startled.  I am made to read all of the book notices worth the reading.  I am made to pore over a half dozen reviews which people in this town know absolutely nothing about—­although they do call mamma the “Pioneer introducer of good Periodicals.”  I am superficial, but she is not.  She reads each good book itself, not the criticism only.  She reads it carefully, thoroughly, as few other people ever do.  Then she gives me a special line of thought to follow, and I am made to go through a little combination of what I have read and of that which she has told me in her direct, compact manner.  Thus does she enable me to produce a written paper which never fails to start the “Culture-Seeking Club” into