What you don't understand about this town is that they can fight about issues all they want, but they don't really care about them.... What they really care about is who they sit next to at dinner.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When ... did the word "temperament" come into fashion with us?... whatever it stands for, it long since became a great social asse...t for women, and a great social excuse for men. Perhaps it came in when we discovered that artists were human beings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At no time in history ... have the people who are not fit for society had such a glorious opportunity to pretend that society is n...ot fit for them. Knowledge of the slums is at present a passport to society--so much the parlor philanthropists have achieved--and all they have to do is to prove that they know their subject. It is an odd qualification to have pitched on; but gentlemen and ladies are always credulous, especially if you tell them that they are not doing their duty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Fashionable women regard themselves, and are regarded by men, as pretty toys or as mere instruments of pleasure; and the vacuity o...f mind, the heartlessness, the frivolity which is the necessary result of this false and debasing estimate of women, can only be fully understood by those who have mingled in the folly and wickedness of fashionable life ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Finishing schools in the fifties were a good place to store girls for a few years before marrying them off, a satisfactory rest st...op between college weekends spent husband hunting. It was a haven for those of us adept at styling each other's hair, playing canasta, and chain smoking Pall Mall extra-long cigarettes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While waiting to get married, several forms of employment were acceptable. Teaching kindergarten was for those girls who stayed in... school four years. The rest were secretaries, typists, file clerks, or receptionists in insurance firms or banks, preferably those owned or run by the family, but respectable enough if the boss was an upstanding Christian member of the community.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
American gentlemen are a cross between English and French men, and yet really altogether like neither. They are more refined and m...odest than Frenchmen, and less manly, shy, and rough, than Englishmen. Their brains are finer and flimsier, their bodies less robust and vigorous than ours. We are the finer animals, and they the subtler spirits. Their intellectual tendency is to excitement and insanity, and ours to stagnation and stupidity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »