THE GOLDEN FLEECE

...
" Oh, well ! but, shade of Susan Brown ! Ichabod ! what is the feminine of Ichabod, by the way, Trednoke? But, seriously, it's too bad. Susan may have been fickle, but she was always aristocratic. And now her daughter is a shop-girl. You and I are avenged !"
You are just as ridiculous, Meschines, as you were thirty or fifty years ago," said the general, tranquilly. You declaim for the sake of hearing your own voice. Besides, what you say is un-American.
Grace Parsloe, as I was saying, got a place as shop-girl in one of the great New York stores. I don^t say she mightn't have done worse: what I say is, I doubt whether she gould have done better. That house I know one of its founders, and I know what I'm talking about is like an enormous family, where children are born, year after year, grow up, and take their places in life according to their quality and merit. What I mean is, that the boy who drives a wagon for them to-day, at three dollars a week, may control one of their chief departments, or even become a partner, before they're done with him ; and, mutatis mutandis, the same with the girls. When these girls marry, it's apt to be into a higher rank of life than they were born in ; and that fact, I take it, is a good indication that their shop-girl experience has been an education and an improvement. They are given work to do, suited to their capacity, be it small or great ; they are in the way of learning something of the great economic laws ; they
learn self-restraint, courtesy, and "
And human nature ! Yes, poor things : they see the American buying- woman, and that is a discipline more trying than any' you
West-Pointers know about! Oh, yes, I see your point. If the fathers of the big family are fathers, and the children are children to them . . . All the same, I fancy the young ladies, when they marry into the higher social circles, as you say they do, don't, as a rule, make their shop-girl days a topic of conversation at five-o'clock teas, or put ' Ex-shop-girl to So-and-so' at the bottom of their visiting-cards."
I believe, after all, you're a snob, Meschines," said the ...

Dettagli