All the sycophantic little sassiety sheets are now engaged in the delectable task of belittling Miss Edna Whitney, selected by Chillicothe, Mo., as maid of honor to the Kween of the Kansas City Karnival, but objected to by the snob management on the ground that she was a working girl. The sheets aforesaid have discovered that since that event brought her into public notice Miss Whitney has accepted $500 from a cigarette firm for the use of her photo, and are now industriously arguing that a young woman who will permit her portrait to be so employed is not a proper person to be brought for a moment into contract with the eminently respectable sassietyest. Rats! ditto rodents. The Karnival was not a "social function," but a commercial scheme gotten up by the merchants of Kansas City to draw trade to that enterprising town. It was a blowout for everybody; the world was invited--the gates thrown open to the Canary in his Canaryism as well as to Sir Alymer in his Alymerism. Lady Vere de Vere and the chambermaid in the dollar-a-day hotel were alike invited to make themselves at home, enjoy the show and spend their siller. Unfortunately, the management of the affair was committed to an incorrigible snob, and he decided that a young lady who earned her own living was not a fit theatrical associate for the patrician daughters of successful soap-boilers and pork-packers, thereby offering an unforgettable and unforgivable affront to all the legions of labor. I do not approve of Miss Whitney's sale of her photo to a cigarette firm; but I do say that the act is infinitely more excusable than the practice among high-fly society women of paying for the publication of decollete portraits and sickening "write-ups" of themselves. Miss Whitney is poor and, I am told, supports a widowed mother. To a girl so situated $500 is a great sum. She could scarce be expected to have the fine aesthetic feelings of a highly educated woman reared in the lap of luxury. Her portrait had already been hawked about in the daily papers,--like those of the swell society set--and, like the latter, freely commented upon by bummers and bawds. She has the excuse of necessity for the sale of her picture, while her sisters in society are driven solely by a prurient itch for notoriety to exploit themselves in the public prints. It does not necessarily follow, as the sassiety sheets would have us believe, that every woman is unchaste whose portrait is found in a cigarette package--I have seen Queen Victoria's, Mrs. Cleveland's and the Princess of Wales' in the same place. These pitiful sheets, which are belittling Miss Whitney to ingratiate themselves with the snobocracy of Kansas City, are entirely destitute of shame. Their editors are, in most instances, a cross between Jeames de la Pluche and Caliban. Their presence at "social functions" is tolerated for the same reason that nigger waiters are admitted. They are used by the parvenues and heartily despised by the very people whom they so