. Our Philadelphia. ties of theWorlds People who flatter themselves they are as exclu-sive, and who have the name for it, and whose exclusivenessis wholesale license compared to that of the Friends:—through the two distinct societies that have lived andflourished side by side ever since Philadelphia was. Butmy concern is solely with the gaieties as I, individually,shared in them. Now that I have outlived the discomfortsof the experience, I can flatter myself that, in my small,insignificant fashion, I was helping to carry on old andfine traditions. II The most serious of these discomforts arose
. Our Philadelphia. ties of theWorlds People who flatter themselves they are as exclu-sive, and who have the name for it, and whose exclusivenessis wholesale license compared to that of the Friends:—through the two distinct societies that have lived andflourished side by side ever since Philadelphia was. Butmy concern is solely with the gaieties as I, individually,shared in them. Now that I have outlived the discomfortsof the experience, I can flatter myself that, in my small,insignificant fashion, I was helping to carry on old andfine traditions. II The most serious of these discomforts arose from thequestion of clothes, a terrifying question under the exist-ing conditions in the Third Street house, involving moreindustrious dress-making upstairs in the third story frontbedroom than I cared about, and a waste of energies thatshould have been directed into more profitable sewed badly and was conscious of it. At the Convent,except for the necessity of darning my stockings, I had — / ^- M^^-. UNDER BROAD STREET STATION AT FIFTEENTH STREET THE SOCIAL ADVENTURE 137 been as free from this sort of toiling as a lily of the field,and yet I too had gone arrayed, if hardly with the sameconspicuous success, and, in my awkward hands, the whitetarlatan—who wears tarlatan now?—^and the cheap silkfrom Second Street, which composed my coming out trous-seau, were not growing into such things of beauty as toreconcile me to my new task. As unpleasant were the preliminary lessons in dancingforced upon me by my family when, in my pride of recentgraduation with honours, it offended me to be thoughtby anybody in need of learning anything. One eveningevery week during a few months, two or three friendsand cousins joined me in the Third Street parlour to bedrilled into dancing shape for coming out by INIadameMartin, the large, portly Frenchwoman who, in the samecrinoline and heelless, sidelaced shoes, taught generationsof Philadelphia children to dance. Even the Conventco
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, bookidcu3192403249, bookyear1914
