But I returned to my room gloriously misanthropic, and for some time my thoughts, like bees, were busy gathering bitter honey. I gave up visiting in the tea-drinking circles of X. I got myself a dark sombrero hat, which I slouched down over my eyes in bandit style when I walked the street and met with any of my former gentle acquaintances. I wrote my mother most sublime and awful letters on the inconceivable vanity and nothingness of human life. I read Plato and Æschylus, and Emerson's Essays, and began to think myself an old Philosopher risen from the dead. There was a melancholy gravity about all my college exercises, and I began to look down on young freshmen and sophomores with a serene compassion, as a sage who has passed through the vale of years and learned that all is vanity. The valley of humiliation may have its charms--it is said that there are many flowers that grow there, and nowhere else, but for all that, a young fellow, so far as I know, generally walks through the first part of it in rather a surly and unamiable state. To be sure, had I been wise, I should have been ready to return thanks on my knees for my disappointment. True, the doll was stuffed with saw-dust, but it was not _my_ doll. I had not learned the cheat when it was forever too late to help myself, and was not condemned to spend life in vain attempts to make a warm, living friend of a cold marble statue. Many a man has succeeded in getting his first ideal, and been a miserable man always thereafter, and therefore. I have lived to hear very tranquilly of Mrs. Will Marshall's soirées and parties, as she reigns in the aristocratic circles of New York; and to see her, still like a polished looking-glass, gracefully reflecting every one's whims and tastes and opinions with charming suavity, and forgetting them when their backs are turned; and to think that she is the right thing in the right place--a crowned Queen of Vanity Fair. I have become, too, very tolerant and indulgent to the women who do as she did,--use their own charms as the coin wherewith to buy the riches and honors of the world. The world has been busy for some centuries in shutting and locking every door through which a woman could step into wealth, except the door of marriage. All vigor and energy, such as men put forth to get this golden key of life, is condemned and scouted as unfeminine; and a woman belonging to the upper classes, who undertakes to get wealth by honest exertion and independent industry, loses caste, and is condemned by a thousand voices as an oddity and a deranged person. A woman gifted with beauty, who sells it to buy wealth, is far more leniently handled. That way of getting money is not called unwomanly; and so long as the whole force of the world goes that way, such marriages as Miss Ellery's and Bill Marshall's will be considered _en régle_. CHAPTER VIII. THE BLUE MISTS.