"The most perplexing thing, philosopher, for a modern woman with social ambitions who wishes to emulate Madame Récamier or Madame de Staël, is that we have no standards in this country. Public opinion is the only test of conduct. The progressive woman is expected on the one hand to be original, and yet on the other to guide correctly, and public opinion reserves the right to follow blindly and to applaud egregiously and afterward to condemn the leaders whom it has flattered into folly. An ambitious woman (or a man, for the matter of that) needs to-day a clear head, a high sense of responsibility, and a sense of humor if she or he would avoid being led astray by the will-o'-the-wisp crew of surface society livers which pursues talent and originality only to be amused, and who, provided it is amused, forgives everything else, and eggs the performer on to believe that its shallow approval is the real verdict of society. This crew, brought into being by mere wealth, lacking purpose and sneering at it if it threatens to interfere with the progress of the merry-go-round, and backed by the army of society reporters and tittle-tattlers, is a growing factor in our large cities and serves to debauch public sentiment by more and more audacious or frivolous ventures concerning the orthodoxy of which it claims to be the only intelligent judge. We are accustomed to sneer at the formal and confining conventions of older civilizations on the ground that liberty of action is thereby checked and life made artificial, but are we not beginning to discover that there are advantages in a definite prescription as to what gentlemen and ladies can do as compared with a happy-go-lucky system of individual competition in social experiments which, however vulgar and demoralizing, are invariably puffed and glorified by the social gossip editors of a host of newspapers? The subsequent course of Mrs. Sherman's career is an illustration of the plight in which a modern woman with social ambitions is liable to find herself as a result of the democratic habit of constituting the half-educated and often morally obtuse society reporter, her successors and assigns, the sole arbiter of what is socially elegant and invigorating.