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 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