How To Go Into Society - Page 2

same as Tom's was, which I described in Chapter II. But where Tom thought his failure was want of talking power, Steve really thinks that he hates society.

It is for boys and girls like Stephen, who think they are "sticks and oafs," and that they cannot go into society, that this paper is written.

You need not get up from your seats and come and stand in a line for me to talk to you,--tallest at the right, shortest at the left, as if you were at dancing-school, facing M. LabbassA(C). I can talk to you just as well where you are sitting; and, as Obed Clapp said to me once, I know very well what you are going to say, before you say it. Dear children, I have had it said to me four-score and ten times by forty-six boys and forty-six girls who were just as dull and just as bright as you are,--as like you, indeed, as two pins.

There is Dunster,--Horace Punster,--at this moment the favorite talker in society in Washington, as indeed he is on the floor of the House of Representatives. Ask, the next time you are at Washington, how many dinner-parties are put off till a day can be found at which Dunster can be present. Now I remember very well, how, a year or two after Dunster graduated, he and Messer, who is now Lieutenant-Governor of Labrador, and some one whom I will not name, were sitting on the shore of the Cattaraugus Lake, rubbing themselves dry after their swim. And Dunster said he was not going to any more parties. Mrs. Judge Park had asked him, because she loved his sister, but she did not care for him a draw, and he did not know the Cattaraugus people, and he was afraid of the girls, who knew a great deal more than he did, and so he was "no good" to anybody, and he would not go any longer. He would stay at home and read Plato in the original. Messer wondered at all this; he enjoyed Mrs. Judge Park's parties, and Mrs. Dr. Holland's teas, and he could not see why as bright a fellow as Dunster should not enjoy them. "But I tell you," said Dunster, "that I do not enjoy them; and, what is more, I tell you that these people do not want me to come. They ask me because they like my sister, as I said, or my father, or my mother."

Then some one else, who was there, whom I do not name, who was at least two years older than these young men, and so was qualified to advise them, addressed them thus:--

"You talk like children. Listen. It is of no consequence whether you like to go to these places or do not like to go. None of us were sent to Cattaraugus to do what we like to do. We were sent here to do what we can to make this place cheerful, spirited, and alive,--a part of the kingdom of heaven. Now if everybody in Cattaraugus sulked off to read Plato, or to read 'The Three Guardsmen,' Cattaraugus would go to the dogs very fast, in its general sulkiness. There must be intimate social order, and this is the method provided. Therefore, first, we must all of us