to get a fifteen-hundred-dollar Cashmere, like Mrs. So-and-so, but we begin to look at hundred-dollar shawls and nibble about the hook.  We don’t expect sets of diamonds, but a diamond ring, a pair of solitaire diamond ear-rings, begins to be speculated about among the young people as among possibilities.  We don’t expect to carpet our house with Axminster and hang our windows with damask, but at least we must have Brussels and brocatelle,—­it would not do not to.  And so we go on getting hundreds of things that we don’t need, that have no real value except that they soothe our self-love,—­and for these inferior articles we pay a higher proportion of our income than our rich neighbor does for his better ones.  Nothing is uglier than low-priced Cashmere shawls; and yet a young man just entering business will spend an eighth of a year’s income to put one on his wife, and when he has put it there it only serves as a constant source of disquiet,—­for now that the door is opened, and Cashmere shawls are possible, she is consumed with envy at the superior ones constantly sported around her.  So also with point-lace, velvet dresses, and hundreds of things of that sort, which belong to a certain rate of income, and are absurd below it.”

“And yet, mamma, I heard Aunt Easygo say that velvet, point-lace, and Cashmere were the cheapest finery that could be bought, because they lasted a lifetime.”

“Aunt Easygo speaks from an income of ten thousand a year; they may be cheap for her rate of living,—­but for us, for example, by no magic of numbers can it be made to appear that it is cheaper to have the greatest bargain in the world in Cashmere, lace, and diamonds, than not to have them at all.  I never had a diamond, never wore a piece of point-lace, never had a velvet dress, and have been perfectly happy, and just as much respected as if I had.  Who ever thought of objecting to me for not having them?  Nobody, as I ever heard.”

“Certainly not, mamma,” said Marianne.

“The thing I have always said to you girls is, that you were not to expect to live like richer people, not to begin to try, not to think or inquire about certain rates of expenditure, or take the first step in certain directions.  We have moved on all our life after a very antiquated and old-fashioned mode.  We have had our little old-fashioned house, our little old-fashioned ways.”

“Except the parlor-carpet, and what came of it, my dear,” said I, mischievously.

“Yes, except the parlor-carpet,” said my wife, with a conscious twinkle, “and the things that came of it; there was a concession there, but one can’t be wise always.”

“We talked mamma into that,” said Jennie.