One may be disposed to stigmatize as frivolity the type of character exhibited by a young female who is wholly taken up with social enjoyments, who does not concern herself about the events that move the world, but who does bestow on her own toilets, worn at festal occasions, such intense attention that after forty years the memory is not yet extinct. Well, I would ask an old, ever-so-efficient general if he does not remember the clink of the saber dragging behind him when he went out for the first time after he received his commission; I would ask the most learned professor of the political sciences if he cannot still see before his eyes the color of the ribbon which he wore on his student cap. But in these things—ball bouquet, lieutenant’s saber, students’ society colors—there lies something additional, quite other than what they are; the fragrance and clink and gleam is of the symbol; they are admission cards to the advertised great festival, winning tickets for the hoped chief prizes of the great lottery,—the Future. Ball triumphs—I can still remember what intensified feelings of intoxication they bring with them. I say intensified, for youth in happy and care-free circumstances is in itself an intoxication. One need not be “frivolous” by a long way—in the sense of superficial and brainless—if one then plunges with a certain passionate fullness of satisfaction in the flood of social amusements; there is vibrating a peculiar electric fluid full of invisible sparks which mean to discharge themselves as happiness or as love—or at least as joy. And the warmer a girl’s emotional life is, the more her mind has been fed on poetic diet, the more proudly she feels that she has treasures of happiness to bestow, the more devoted love she feels the force within her capable of, so much the more sensitive is she to the mysterious crackle of those sparks. He who does not hear the crackle, to whose head the intoxicating foam is not rising, through whom the passionate hopes of happiness are not glowing,—well, he does find the whole business flat and vapid, and charges the young fools who are giving themselves up to all this with being superficial. But after a few seasons a sobering-down comes to everybody. One who lets himself be forever satisfied with social festivities, even when the first flush of youth is past and the promises have not been fulfilled, who does not then recognize “the important thing” in other aims, in new duties, in serious activity, is indeed irredeemably frivolous.