"Oh, almost always on the long piazza. It is so clean there, and we don't
like to soil our dresses."

Now I ask if girls could ever get into that state in the natural course of
things! It is the result of vile habits. They cease to care for things
which they ought to like to do, and they devote themselves to what ought
to be only an incident. People dress in their best without break. They go
to the springs before breakfast in shining raiment, and they go into the
parlor after supper in shining raiment, and it is shine, shine, shine, all
the way between, and a different shine each time. You may well suppose
that I was like an owl among birds of Paradise, for what little finery I
had was in my (eminently) travelling-trunk: yet, though it was but a dory,
compared with the Noah's arks that drove up every day, I felt, that, if I
could only once get inside of it, I could make things fly to some purpose.
Like poor Rabette, I would show the city that the country too could wear
clothes! I never walked down Broadway without seeing a dozen white trunks,
and every white trunk that I saw I was fully convinced was mine, if I
could only get at it. By-and-by mine came, and I blossomed. I arrayed
myself for morning, noon, and night, and everything else that came up, and
was, as the poet says,--

"Prodigious in change,
And endless in range,"--

for I would have scorned not to be as good as the best. The result was,
that in three days I touched bottom. But then we went away, and my
reputation was saved. I don't believe anybody ever did a larger business
on a smaller capital; but I put a bold face on it. I cherish the hope that
nobody suspected I could not go on in that ruinous way all summer,--I, who