The entertainment concluded with a stereopticon exhibition of supposedly humorous events, which obviously did not strike the children as funny at all.  Supper was laid in the dining room, where the table had been arranged as if for a banquet of diplomats.  There were flowers in abundance and a life-size swan of icing at each end.  Each child was assisted by its own nurse, and our butler and a footman served, in stolid dignity, a meal consisting of rice pudding, cereals, cocoa, bread and butter, and ice-cream.

It was by all odds the most decorous affair ever held in our house.  At the end the gifts were distributed—­Parisian dolls, toy baby-carriages and paint boxes for the girls; steam engines, magic lanterns and miniature circuses for the boys.  My bill for these trifles came to one hundred and twelve dollars.  At half-past six the carriages arrived and our guests were hurried away.

I instance this affair because it struck the note of elegant propriety that has always been the tone of our family and social life.  The children invited to the party were the little boys and girls whose fathers and mothers we thought most likely to advance their social interests later on.

Of these children two of the girls have married members of the foreign nobility—­one a jaded English lord, the other a worthless and dissipated French count; another married—­fifteen years later—­one of these same little boys and divorced him within eighteen months; while two of the girls—­our own—­have not married.

Of the boys one wedded an actress; another lives in Paris and studies “art”; one has been already accounted for; and two have given their lives to playing polo, the stock market, and elevating the chorus.

* * * * *

Beginning at this early period, my two daughters, and later on my son, met only the most select young people of their own age in New York and on Long Island.  I remember being surprised at the amount of theatergoing they did by the time the eldest was nine years old.  My wife made a practice of giving a children’s theater party every Saturday and taking her small guests to the matinee.  As the theaters were more limited in number then than now these comparative infants sooner or later saw practically everything that was on the boards—­good, bad and indifferent; and they displayed a precocity of criticism that quite astounded me.

Their real social career began with children’s dinners and dancing parties by the time they were twelve, and their later coming out changed little the mode of life to which they had been accustomed for several years before it.  The result of their mother’s watchful care and self-sacrifice is that these two young ladies could not possibly be happy, or even comfortable, if they married men unable to furnish them with French maids, motors, constant amusement, gay society, travel and Paris clothes.

Without these things they would wither away and die like flowers deprived of the sun.  They are physically unfit to be anything but the wives of millionaires—­and they will be the wives of millionaires or assuredly die unmarried.  But, as the circle of rich young men of their acquaintance is more or less limited their chances of matrimony are by no means bright, albeit that they are the pivots of a furious whirl of gaiety which never stops.