But Mamie was not the only girl who gave trouble to her friends that autumn. In another street--the Fifty-Somethingeth--sits the Beauty, Kitty Farnum, lounging back lazily in her chair, her perfect arms clasped behind her head, a sort of democratic Cleopatra, looking, with her silent idle scorn, at her mother, who is chiding her. Her mother is carefully dressed, well educated, worldly enough in all conscience sake; and yet there is something about her, about her or about her voice, that makes the haughty beauty sicken with a consciousness of difference between them. Kitty has the pride of a coronet, if not the taste for one. “I heard you positively discouraged him at Lenox.” The mother is speaking of Lord Birmingham; and the daughter is thinking that, when a girl, her mother must have been admired of “gentlemen friends” and have worn gold ornaments about her neck. For Kitty has that intense appreciation of small differences of social habit that a clever child inherits when parents are acutely conscious of their lack of social position. If the factory and railroads and exchanges be the all-in-all of life, these things are trifles; but our economists who ignore them forget how much of life is left besides mere work, how great a part in life is played by self-esteem. Your baron of the middle ages scorned them, for he had his horse and battle-axe and coat-of-mail; and, perhaps, had you given these to his hind, the churl might have made as good a baron, and the baron would have been like any other soldier, in his eating and his thinking and his lying down. But to-day you put these two together, and they speak two words, and each knows--and much more their wives and daughters--that they “move in different spheres.” But why then, in this democracy, does the one sphere, in successive stages as you ascend, hate, envy, imitate, and seek to enter the other? Alas! if they were better men, even as our mediæval baron was the better man than his churl, the folly of the imitation would be gone. But _amour-propre_ still rules humanity, although democracy apportion out its goods, and when _amour-propre_ shall turn from show of affluence to proof of excellence, we shall see great things. And love it may be yet that makes the world go round; but, alas! in so many marriages, both sides love themselves. “It was reported even in the _Herald_, that it was to be a match,” said Mrs. Farnum, plaintively. “And now, he has gone off on his yacht, and they will say that he has jilted you.” “Mother, I will marry whom I like--and when I like,” said Kitty. “But tell me, my darling--you do not like anyone else?” said Mrs. Farnum, coaxingly. “My dear mother----” “I do wish you would say ‘mamma,’ and not insist on calling me mother.” And she thought hastily over the men she knew her child had seen that summer. “I hope it is not Van Kull--or that young Holyoke,” she added, in increasing terror.