Alice and Louisa Stanwood were employed much like other young ladies of their age, hemming long, mysterious slips of muslin, or embroidering in worsted, and now and then chatting of the last night’s party, or the gayeties of the coming evening. They were pretty, and rich, and young, and gay, and admired, and happy. They knew they had complexions and figures to be both studied and improved—at all events, not to be injured by the adoption of awkward habits. They were fully alive to the merits of the last new bonnet, and had their own opinions touching the “Elssler fling,” and the harmonies of Ole Bull. What with dressing and calling, and dining and driving, with parties, balls, and social cotillions; with sleeping good, long, renovating night’s sleep, and perhaps a little siesta after dinner, really the months, and even the years, went by with astonishing rapidity. They had already whirled Alice into her twentieth and Louisa into her eighteenth winter. (Our city belles do not count life by summers,) yet placid smiles dwelt on their unruffled features, and even thought had passed, zephyr-like, over their brows, nor left a mark behind. Their laugh had a joyousness born of the present, in which neither hope nor memory had share. They had had no time to think, to feel, to suffer. But that there was suffering in the world they knew very well. They knew it by reading history, and the newspapers; nay, they knew, too, there was suffering of many sorts, and often and often had they dropped the sympathetic tear over the sentimental woes which the “cunning hand” of genius portrayed in the novel of the day. Madam Stanwood, the grandmother of these fair girls, reclined in the easiest of easy chairs, her feet imbedded in the yielding “brioche,” and by her side her little reading stand, on which she had just laid down her book and spectacles. Her pale and composed features, her comely attire, her dignified deportment, had all that makes age winning and respectable; and the fond glances with which she regarded her grandchildren, spoke not less her readiness to sympathize with youth, than youth’s tenderness and respect for her; for we do, indeed, “receive but what we give,” and rarely is there an instance of heartfelt sympathy with the young, that is not cheerfully and sincerely answered. “The history of any individual, if it were faithfully written out, would be an epic poem,” said Madam Stanwood, repeating the last lines she had been reading. “What do you think of that, my dears? Does it not startle you to look at the faces you meet in the streets, and think of the history that is so unwritten on them?” “Undoubtedly it would, grandma, if we ever thought of reading faces; but, really, I must think there is more poetry than truth in the remark; I should sooner complain of the entire want of meaning in the faces and lives of those I meet, than be alarmed at the announcement of a history in them.”