No young man with an income of less than twenty thousand a year would have the temerity to propose to either of them.  Even on twenty thousand they would have a hard struggle to get along; it would mean the most rigid economy—­and, if there were babies, almost poverty.

Besides, when girls are living in the luxury to which mine are accustomed they think twice before essaying matrimony at all.  The prospects of changing Newport, Palm Beach, Paris, Rome, Nice and Biarritz for the privilege of bearing children in a New York apartment house does not allure, as in the case of less cosmopolitan young ladies.  There must be love—­plus all present advantages!  Present advantages withdrawn, love becomes cautious.

Even though the rich girl herself is of finer clay than her parents and, in spite of her artificial environment and the false standards by which she is surrounded, would like to meet and perhaps eventually marry some young man who is more worth while than the “pet cats” of her acquaintance, she is practically powerless to do so.  She is cut off by the impenetrable artificial barrier of her own exclusiveness.  She may hear of such young men—­young fellows of ambition, of adventurous spirit, of genius, who have already achieved something in the world, but they are outside the wall of money and she is inside it, and there is no way for them to get in or for her to get out.  She is permitted to know only the jeunesse doree—­the fops, the sports, the club-window men, whose antecedents are vouched for by the Social Register.

She has no way of meeting others.  She does not know what the others are like.  She is only aware of an instinctive distaste for most of the young fellows among whom she is thrown.  At best they are merely innocuous when they are not offensive.  They do nothing; they intend never to do anything.  If she is the American girl of our plays and novels she wants something better; and in the plays and novels she always gets him—­the dashing young ranchman, the heroic naval lieutenant, the fearless Alaskan explorer, the tireless prospector or daring civil engineer.  But in real life she does not get him—­except by the merest fluke of fortune.  She does not know the real thing when she meets it, and she is just as likely to marry a dissipated groom or chauffeur as the young Stanley of her dreams.

The saddest class in our social life is that of the thoroughbred American girl who is a thousand times too good for her de-luxe surroundings and the crew of vacuous la-de-da Willies hanging about her, yet who, absolutely cut off from contact with any others, either gradually fades into a peripatetic old maid, wandering over Europe, or marries an eligible, turkey-trotting nondescript—­“a mimmini-pimmini, Francesca da Rimini, je-ne-sais-quoi young man.”