Alice Duer Miller

“ III. Kindness of heart is one of the virtues which is made to do duty for many minor faults, and when Marie Louise opened the Sunday Watch-Dog on the morning of the day on which she was to lunch with Miss Bowles, she really feared she had erred through too easy amiability. A full-length portrait of herself in evening dress took up one of the outside pages, labeled, “Miss Marie Louise Carman, multimillionaire, philanthropist, and débutante.” The rather weak climax did not strike Marie Louise, who was taken up with the second word in the series. ”

“ We have cultivated such a taste for the best, that we are the only people he can feel friendship for.”
“I rather doubt that,” said Peale.
“I wish I could,” put in Jerry. “I often think I should like a return to nature—white muslin and a big waist—but after a short experience of you, Mrs. Bill, it isn’t possible.”
“The truth of it is,” Mrs. Emmons went on, “Prixley is more of a snob than any of us. He won’t go to people’s houses just because they give nice parties. He wants to know who they are. That is what he is always asking, isn’t he, Serena? Who are they? ”

“ Yet women should beware of flattering themselves with this belief, merely because their sons fail to live up to the passions invented for them. It was more Mrs. Orvice’s judgment than Jerry's constancy that was at fault; and she often accused him of having got over passions that had existed only in her own timorous imagination.
As they sat down at the lunch-table (the party consisted of only the Emmonses, Peale, Jerry, and Miss Carman) , Mrs. Emmons turned to Marie Louise
“I hear you have taken the Washburn house,” she said. “I think you are so sensible.” ”

“ Emmons, sitting between a man who is under indictment for bribery and——”
“Now, please, Prixley,” interrupted Miss Bowles, “don't begin to talk like that. I don’t think anything is more second-rate than to introduce moral ideas into social relations. I have some cousins in Yonkers who are always asking me about ‘the immorality of society.’ They intimate it is the reason why they don’t mingle with it. (I need not tell you the real reason, poor old ladies.) I judge people just the way I find them. ”

“ If they swim they are all right, if they sink they're not—or perhaps it was just the other way. Anyhow, I am always willing to give a helping hand as long as they can keep their heads above water, and if my virtue needs a victim, I expend it in pushing down those who have already gone under. ”

“ Peale, because he liked so few people that his indifference could do no harm, while his liking a great deal of good; and Jerry Orvice, because the attentions of that sort of young man made a girl more enviable than anything else, in Miss Bowles’ opinion, to say nothing of the prospect of so advantageous a marriage for Jerry. ”

“ Carman was merely dragged against her will at the wheels of Marie Louise’s chariot. On the contrary, the elder women enjoyed seeing the world more than the younger. Before her marriage she had gone once to Europe with her father, the cashier, and, though she had seen nothing off the beaten track, she remembered it all with an accuracy that more extended travelers might envy, and she still corresponded with some of the acquaintances she had made. She had, in a way, a faculty for making friends. The summer before, while Marie Louise had been driving, sullen and ignored, about Newport, Mrs. ”