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 fille, who, to modernize the phrase of an old poet, aspires to a soul in silken hosiery and doeskin boots. She springs, this young creature with ankles sheathed and shod like a Virginia deer—ankles whose trimness is, æsthetically speaking, quite the finest thing her family has produced in America—she springs from a grandmother who clumped out in wooden shoes to milk a solitary cow in Sweden. She has no soul, the young thing, but she trusts that the tailor, the milliner, the bootmaker, the manicurist, the hairdresser, and the masseuse can give her an equivalent. Wherever art can work on her surfaces, she is finished. When the car is at the door in the morning—"a distinctive body on a distinguished chassis"—and she runs down the steps with somewhat more than a flash of her silken perfections, she is exquisite, what though the voice is a bit hard and shrill with which she calls out, "H'lo, kiddo! Le's go't Brentano's."

She is indeed coming—the new reader! She will bring home an armful of magazines, smelling deliciously of the press, books with exciting yellow jackets, plays newly translated and imported, the latest stories, the most recent ideas, all set forth in the current fashion, and all, as it will seem to her, about herself, her sort of people, her sort of world, and about the effort which her fair young ego is making to emerge from the indiscriminated mass and to acquire physical form and line congruous with that "distinctive body mounted on a distinguished