Just as Market street in San Francisco forms the sharp demarking line between possible and impossible so does Market street, Philadelphia, perform a similar service for William Penn's city. You must live "below" Market street, which means somewhere south of that thoroughfare. "No one" lives "above Market," which is, of course, untrue, for many hundreds of thousands of very estimable folk live north of that street. In fact, two-thirds of the entire population of Philadelphia live north of Market, which runs in a straight line almost east and west. But society--and society in Philadelphia rules with no unsteady hand--decries that a few city squares south of Market and west of Broad shall be its own _demesne_. You may have your country house out in the lovely suburbs of the town, if you will, and there are no finer suburban villages in all the world than Bryn Mawr or Ognotz or Jenkintown--but if you live in town you must live in the correct part of the town or give up social ambitions. And there is little use carrying social ambitions to Philadelphia anyway. No city in the land, not even Boston or Charleston, opens its doors more reluctantly to strange faces and strange names, than open these doors of the old houses roundabout Rittenhouse square. And for man or woman coming resident to the town to hope to enter one of Philadelphia's great annual Assemblies within a generation is quite out of the possibilities. Rittenhouse square may seem warm and friendly and democratic with its neat pattern of paths and grass-plots, its rather genteel loungers upon its shadiest benches, the children of the nurse-maids playing beneath the trees. But the great houses that look down into it are neither warm nor friendly nor democratic. They are merely gazing at you--and inquiring--inquiring if you please, if you have Pennsylvania blood and breeding. If you have not, closed houses they are to remain to you. But if you do possess these things they will open--with as warm and friendly a hospitality as you may find in the land. There is the first trace of the Southland in the hospitality of Philadelphia, just as her red brick houses, her brick pavement and her old-fashioned use of the market, smack of the cities that rest to the south rather than those to the north. * * * * *