regards their privations as fit subjects for elegy,
or their self-restraint as in any way worthy
of eulogy? Men who have no margin even
fringing Whitecross-street are men out of the
social pale.

Some spend their margin on food. They
will not have second-class food of any kind;
inferior joints a penny a pound cheaper than
the best are an abomination to them; "stickings,"
even for soup and stock, they will not put
up with; the prime joints of the primest meat,
for a fancy price, that is their little vanity, and
the way in which they spend their extra. These
are the people who pride themselves in giving
you dinners not to be had for love or money
anywhere but at their tables. Not dinner
parties, remember, but snug little dinners to
one or two at most; and costing as much as a
week's supply for the whole family. The table-
cloth may be worn and crumpled; the dishes
may be chipped and broken, of odd patterns and
on two pieces fitting; the (plated) silver may be
worn-out; but the champagne is exquisite, the
dishes would do honour to a cordon bleu, and
nothing is forgotten, down to the caviare and the
olives. One or two such dinners would have
bought new table linen and a new dinner-service;
but the margin goes in the food not the platters,
and not what one sees but what one eats is
considered the first necessity of civilised life. I
have eaten dinners fit for a royal table in their
degree, in a room and with appointments below
the squalor of a fifth-rate eating-house. They
were costly dinners in relation with my friend's
income and mode of life; very costly
dinners; but that was his way of underscoring
his margin, and it was not for me to take him
to task for the application. I cannot say that
I would have ever imitated him; but in all
probability he would not have imitated me in
my application of my margin; so we were
quits. As no man rides his neighbour's hobby
with the same bridle, so no man writes off his
margin under the same heading; and what is
absolutely an essential with one, is only an
accident with another, to be taken or rejected at
pleasure.

There is a certain application of margin of
which I scarcely know how to speak. It is so
good in its motive that no one likes to decry
it as excessive: and yet it is excessive and
foolish too. This is the education which some
poor people give their children. "The best of
educations, my dear; we have saved, and pinched,
and toiled, and denied ourselves all these years
that our children might be well educated. It
was all we could do for them, and we have done
it." Yes, that is all very well; but the best
education may be had for a less cost than what
our friends have given, and there is no use in
paying fancy prices, even for Latin and Greek.
The kind of education I am speaking of now
consists in sending children of second-class
fortunes to first-class schools, where they are
the poorest of the lot, and where they associate
with boys and girls whose acquaintance they
cannot keep up in after life, because their
respective spheres will never touch. It is not so
much what they learn there, because schools of
lower price give the same amount and quality of
teaching; but it is the prestige of the school
itself, the social standing of the pupils, which
fascinate the parents. The grammar school
close at hand gives at least as sound instruction;
but our butcher's sons are there, and our grocer
sends his boys too, and though both butcher and
grocer could buy us out and out, and though
their boys are as well behaved lads as our
own, yet the name sticks, and we would rather
pay to efface it. It is doubtful if we are
doing our young ones a kindness all this
while, and if it would not have been better
to have given them as good an education, with
less costly fringes to the bill. "We are only
preparing heart-aches for the time when the
difference of spheres shall be fully understood,
and the great landed proprietor will think the
poor apothecary no fit companion for himself
and his wife, for all that they were schoolfellows
in the old days at Bunbury's, and the future
pill-maker beat the young lord of the manor at
every exercise of wits. It is the same with
girls who are sent to schools beyond their home
surroundings. It is all very nice and kind of
parents who apply their margin in this unselfish
manner; but for poor Lottie and Lulu, with
their dingy frocks and scanty wardrobe, set in
the midst of little birds of paradise bedizened
and bedecked, it is a trial for which not
even the honour of being taught by the great
signor or the still greater signora wholly
compensates. Girls have a small martyrdom
to go through when thrown thus into the
midst of richer companions. There is an
activity in the feminine intellect in the matter
of invidious comparisons, and a penetration as
to relative values, which makes life very hard
to those not of the more favoured kind; and if
papa and mamma could fully realise the
mortifications and annoyances to which their darlings
are submitted, they would eschew their dream of
a good education under that form, and accept
the simpler arrangements to be had for half the
cost and none of the pains.

Some people go into society as their means of
getting rid of such spare cash as may cling
about their threadbare purses. They set out
with the professed inability to return the
compliment; but, in spite of this, evening after
evening you may meet them in good houses,
thoroughly well dressed, and always agreeable,
conscientiously doing their best. They know
that they must pay somehow for these invitations.
They cannot pay in kind—in dinners
or in suppers—so they pay in talking well; in
singing without the need of pressing; in being
willing to make themselves foils for the more
brilliant; in taking a hand at whist when wanted,
and losing their penny points with a grace; or
even in playing dummy. This is the coin in which
they pay for advantages which the margin of their
fortunes is too narrow to compass otherwise.
All that this margin can do is to supply them
with the dress, ornaments, and conveyance