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 matinée. 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.
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 Present advantages withdrawn, love becomes cautious.