We have already observed the intellectual posture of Boston during the Gilded Age. Frigid and emasculate, it cast upon the presuming outsider the cold and hostile eye of an elderly maiden aunt who is not prepared to stand any nonsense. "To-morrow night," writes Mark Twain, in one of his earlier letters, "I appear for the first time before a Boston audience--4,000 critics"; he was lecturing with Petroleum V. Nasby, and he tells how frightened Petroleum was before the ordeal. Fortunately, in a sense, for Mark Twain, he had, in Mr. Howells, a charitable sponsor, a charitable intermediary; but unfortunately for his genius Mr. Howells was no more independent than himself: Mr. Howells was almost as much the nervous and timid alien in Boston society as Mrs. Clemens, and as the latter's natural ally and supreme authority in the task of shaping her husband, instead of dispelling Mark Twain's fears he simply redoubled them. Together, like two tremulous maids dressing the plebeian daughter of some newly-rich manufacturer in order to make her presentable for a court ball, they worked over him, expurgated him, trimmed him--to his own everlasting gratitude. To Mr. Howells he wrote: "I owe as much to your training as the rude country job-printer owes to the city-boss who takes him in hand and teaches him the right way to handle his art"; and of his wife he said: "I was a mighty rough, coarse, unpromising subject when Livy took charge of me ... and I may _still_ be to the rest of the world, but not to her. She has made a very creditable job of me." And no doubt that refining process was necessary. If Mark Twain had been enabled to stand on his own feet, had been helped to discover himself as an artist, it would have resulted naturally from the growth of his own self-consciousness, his own critical sense. As it was, undertaken in behalf of a wholly false, external ideal and by people who had no comprehension of his true principle of growth, people who were themselves subservient to public opinion, it destroyed the last vestiges of his moral independence. There is a sorry tale about Mark Twain's neckties that is really symbolic of the process he was going through. It seems that long after his marriage he still continued to wear an old-fashioned Western string-tie which was a cause of great embarrassment to his family and his friends, an ever-present reminder that his regeneration was still incomplete. No one quite knew what to do about it till at last Howells and Aldrich boldly bought him two cravats and humored him, to his wife's infinite comfort, into wearing them. In this way the mysteries of a provincial gentility--provincial because it was without a sense of proportion--were kept constantly before his mind and he, the lovable victim of his own love, a Gulliver among the Lilliputians, a sleeping Samson, surrendered his limbs to the myriad threads of convention, yielded his locks to the shears of that simple Delilah his wife.