Of course Flossie went to a fashionable school on Fifth Avenue, where she chose her friends judiciously, and it was at this time that she began to read books. She derived much profit from books, and has always owed much to them; even now she reads a little, as an old habit not quite outgrown. I don’t know what it was fired her maidenly ambition; “Lucille” had not been written then, nor Ouida’s works, but I doubt there was something similar. And it was certainly books that gave her her first inkling of a _beau monde_. She used to be very generous among the girls, her schoolmates, but never sought to take the lead among them, and was only known as a rather nice little thing from Eighteenth Street. She never even tried to make their brothers’ acquaintance, which was duly ascribed on their part to her proper sense of the fitness of things. The brothers were more interested in her. Once she was asked to spend a week’s vacation with Miss Brevier; but she never invited any of her school friends to her own house. If she had not been so clever, she might almost have become popular. As you see, Flossie learned much at school; but she took away more, and most of all she had carried thither with her. In her maiden meditation, Miss Starbuck gave much and serious thought to what could be done with her father and brother. Silas, Jr., was a big, large-boned fellow with a heavy jaw; thick as to legs and head; in whom the family traits came out with peculiar coarseness, much as when you raise a mullein in a garden. The effect of wealth had been to produce him with greater luxuriance and less pruning, in more size and even coarser fibre. However false may be this analogy, there is no doubt that his brave old uncle, who had struggled with famine and the setting ice in Arctic seas, belonged to a much finer type of manhood. Fortunately, as Miss Flossie reflected, there were no ethics in the question. Fashion asks no awkward questions. Style, in the year 1868, in New York, of all the cardinal virtues, was perhaps the easiest to attain. They had the money--if she could screw it out of Mr. Starbuck.