The Tupelo journal., 1906-03-30
nv MARGARET E. sANGsTER.

Those of us who are outside the
smart set and who have no wish or ax-
pectation ever to be within it, have of
course only a vague idea Of the life it
leads. What is called the smart set
includes only a few among the great
mass of Americans, most OF us being
working peopl- to whom each day
brings a rou..nl JI duties and who are
perfectly satisfied if we make both
ends meet, and have a little over at
the end of the year.
1t would not De fair to say Of the
smart set that it is composed OF the
idle rich. They, too, are In the minor
ity. A great many wealthy men and
women are anything but idle. They
toll as strenuously as the poorest. they
do a great deal Of good. often without
ostentation, and they are not even on
the edge of the set about whom we
are thinking.
A woman may veal sables and dia-
monds, go to Europe every year, live
in great elegance and entertain royalty
and still be as sweet and simple and
gentle as her neighbor who manages a
small income with economy and makes
bright her little home.
1t is not what we have, but what we
are that makes true womanhood lively
and charming. A man may admins
ter millions and be as good and true
and honorable as the humblest clerk
in his employment. 1t is a dangerous
doctrine which teaches that the poor
are better than the rich, because of
their poverty, or the rich worse than
the poor because of their wealth. Au-
tomobiles are not inventions of the
OF %iniquity.
We who have no acquaintance with
the smart set except as the society CO.
umn in the newspapers report its go
ings to and fro. it's weddings, divorces
and remarriages, have recently been
a popular novel. said to be written
by one who has had special opportuni-
ties for knowing whereof she speaks.
The glimpse of the smart set given US
in this romance is distinctly depress-
ing. Gathering about a central figure,
that of a beautiful orphan girl, are
men and women who seem to have
about as much of the milk of human
kindness in .neir veins as wolves in a
pack. The women gamble, the men do
worse. AS for any ethical standard,
if the House of Mirth' is to be trust
ed. it does not exist in the smart set.
Men and women are openly or furtive-
ly unfaithful to their marriage VOWS;
q married man does not hesitate to
take a contemplate advantage of the
helplessness of a girl who has been his
wife's intimate friend. Men sneer at
virtue. think the worst of each other,
and of the women who are their kim
bred. Chivalry is apparently a lost
art. Honor is a faint mirage on a re-
mote horizon. A girl incurs financial
obligations from a man, and ..ence-
forth becomes more and more entan-
gled in a web of duplicity, and in
meshes which fatally ensnare her. Her
intentions are not evil. but her very
inability to comprehend that any
values beyond those that are financial
are known in the world, complicates
the situation for her. Married women
write compromising letters to men
whom they meet socially, who are sup
posed to be friends of their husbands,
and in one case the man who is more
nearly a gentleman than any other in
the book, simply tears such letters in
two and losses them into the waste
basket. There is hardly, in the whole
story, a character who could decently
pass muster among ordinary men and
women, the two who are supposed to
be patterns of goodness being singu-
larly destitute of humor and common
sense.
If the smart set be like this, so
heartless, so corrupt, so cruel, our con
clusion is that it's career must be short.
There is far too much essential reality
in America to endure very long that
which is wholly false and meretricious.
We are fain to believe, however,
that the picture is overdrawn. There
must be behind the silken portieres
anu velvet hangings of these exquisite
homes some who have kept unframed
a fairer ideal. All the young women
who go to French dressmakers and
wear gowns that cost a fortune are not
like poor Lily Bart, who from baby
hood had been taught that the only
life worth living was a life of display,
and that it were better to die and be
done with it than to be out of the
fashion. All the men who understand
the ups and downs of finance and
whose names are spells to conjure
with in the market, are not sordid and
mean and rapacious. Our Hebrew
friends have a right to protest against
their representative in these pages that
profess to depict with truth the sue
cessful climbing of one of their race to
the perch which seemed to him a fitting
goal for his ambition. Notwithstand-
ing the melancholy muddle of it all,
there must linger shreds of human
kindness and commonplace goodness in
the smart set.
Yet the picture points a moral and
indicates a warning. 1t is like a dam
ger signal on the road. We, in Ameri-
ca. are striding forward at a tremen-
dous pace. We are becoming nomadlc;
not contented with permanence n
stability, with homes that gather 10
themselves the sweetness OF fond asso-
Citations and the glory OF old tradltions
we are becoming accustomed 10 a