But the truth is that the very use of the word “society” in this sense is narrow and misleading.  We Americans are fortunate enough to live in a larger society, where no conventional position or family traditions exert an influence that is to be in the least degree compared with the influence secured by education, energy, and character.  No matter how fastidious the social circle, one is constantly struck with the limitations of its influence, and with the little power exerted by its members as compared with that which may easily be wielded by tongue and pen.  No merely fashionable woman in New York, for instance, has a position sufficiently important to be called influential compared with that of a woman who can speak in public so as to command hearers, or can write so as to secure readers.  To be at the head of a normal school, or to be a professor in a college where co-education prevails, is to have a sway over the destinies of America which reduces all mere “social position” to a matter of cards and compliments and page’s buttons.

THE BATTLE OF THE CARDS

The great winter’s contest of the visiting-cards recommences at the end of every autumn.  Suspended during the summer, or only renewed at Newport and such thoroughbred and thoroughly sophisticated haunts, it will set in with fury in the habitable regions of our cities before the snow falls.  Now will the atmosphere of certain streets and squares be darkened—­or whitened—­at the appointed hour by the shower of pasteboard transmitted from dainty kid-gloved hands to the cotton-gloved hands of “John,” and destined through him to reach the possibly gloveless hands of some other John, who stands obsequious in the doorway.  Now will every lady, after John has slammed the door, drive happily on to some other door, rearranging, as she goes, her display of cards, laid as if for a game on the opposite seat of her carriage, and dealt perhaps in four suits,—­her own cards, her daughters’, her husband’s, her “Mr. and Mrs.” cards, and who knows how many more?  With all this ammunition, what a very mitrailleuse of good society she becomes; what an accumulation of polite attentions she may discharge at any door!  That one well-appointed woman, as she sits in her carriage, represents the total visiting power of self, husband, daughters, and possibly a son or two beside.  She has all their counterfeit presentments in her hands.  How happy she is! and how happy will the others be on her return, to think that dear mamma has disposed of so many dear, beloved, tiresome, social foes that morning!  It will be three months at least, they think, before the A’s and the B’s and the C’s will have to be “done” again.