It is a relief too, now and then, to get out of the world of morals into the world of woman; out of the hard sphere of right and wrong into a world like Mr. Swinburne's, where judgment goes by the beautiful, and where red hair makes all the difference between Elizabeth and Mary of Scotland. Above all, there is the delightful consciousness of superiority. The happiness of the blessed in the next world consists, according to Sir John Mandeville, in their being able to behold the agonies of the lost; and half the satisfaction men have in their own sense and vigor and success would be lost if they could not enjoy the delicious view of the world where sense and energy go for nothing.

Whether all this would be worth sacrificing simply to acquire a woman who could sympathize with, and support, a man in the stress and battle of life, is a question we do not pretend to decide; but it is certain that the enfranchisement of woman would be the passing of a social Act of Uniformity, and the loss of half the grace and variety of life. Here, as elsewhere, "the low sun makes the color," and the very excellences of Miss Hominy carry her aloft into regions of white light, where our eyes, even if dazzled, get a little tired with the monotony of the intellectual Haze.

The result of such a change on woman herself would be something far greater and more revolutionary. It is not merely that, as in the case of men, she would lose the sense and comfort of another world of thought and action, and of its contrast with the world in which she lives; it is that she would lose her own world altogether. Conceive, for instance, woman obliged to take life in earnest, to study as men study, to work as men work. The change would be no mere modification, but the utter abolition of her whole present existence. The whole theory of woman's life is framed on the hypothesis of sheer indolence. She is often charming, but she is always idle. There is an immense ingenuity and a perfect grace about her idleness; the efforts, in fact, of generations of cultivated women have been directed, and successfully directed, to this special object of securing absolute indolence without either the inner tedium or the outer contempt which indolence is supposed to bring in its train.

Woman can always say with Titus, "I have wasted a day," but the confession wears an air of triumph rather than regret. A world of trivial occupations, a whole system of social life, has been laboriously invented that the day might be wasted gracefully and without boredom. A little riding, a little reading, a little dabbling with the paint-brush, a little strumming on the piano, a little visiting, a little shopping, a little dancing, and a general trivial chat scattered over the whole, make up the day of an English girl in town. Transplant her into the country, and the task of frittering away existence, though it becomes more difficult, is faced just as gallantly as before. Mudie comes to the rescue with the back novels which she was too busy to get through in the season; there is the scamper from one country house to another, there are the flirtations to keep her hand in, the pets to be fed, the cousins to extemporize a mimic theatre, the curate—if worst comes to worst—to try a little ritualism upon. With these helps a country day, what with going to bed early and getting up late, may be frittered away as aimlessly as a day in town.

Woman may fairly object, we think, to abolish at one fell swoop such an ingenious fabric of idleness as this. A revolution in the whole system of social life, in the whole conception and drift of feminine existence, is a little too much to ask. As it is, woman wraps herself in her indolence, and is perfectly satisfied with her lot. She assumes, and the world has at least granted the assumption, that her little hands were never made to do anything which any rougher hands can do for them. Man has got accustomed to serve as her hewer of wood and drawer of water, and to expect nothing from her but poetry and refinement. It is a little too much to ask her to go back to the position of the squaw, and to do any work for herself. But it is worse to ask her to remodel the world around her, on the understanding that henceforth duty and toil and self-respect are to take the place of frivolity and indolence and adoration.

The great passion which knits the two sexes together presents a yet stronger difficulty. To men, busy with the work of the world, there is no doubt that, however delightful, love takes the form of a mere interruption of their real life. They allow themselves the interval of its indulgence, as they allow themselves any other holiday, simply as something in itself temporary and accidental; as life, indeed, grows more complex, there is an increasing tendency to reduce the amount of time and attention which men devote to their affections. Already the great philosopher of the age has pronounced that the passion of love plays far too important a part in human existence, and that it is a terrible obstacle to human progress.

The general temper of the times echoes the sentence of Mr. Mill. The enthusiastic votary who has been pouring his vows at the feet of his mistress consoles himself, as he leaves her, with the thought that engagements cannot last for ever, and that he shall soon be able to get back to the real world of business and of life. He presses his beloved one, with all the eloquence of passion, to fix an early day for their union, but the eloquence has a very practical bearing. While Corydon is piping to Phyllis, he is anxious about the engagements he is missing, and the distance he is losing in the race for life. But Phyllis remains the nymph of passion and poetry and romance.

Time has no meaning for her; she is not neglecting any work; she is only idle, as she always is idle. But love throws a new glory and a new interest around her indolence. The endless little notes with which she worries the Post-Office and her friends become suddenly sacred and mysterious. The silly little prattle hushes into confidential whispers. Every crush through the season, becomes the scene of a reunion of two hearts which have been parted for the eternity of twenty-four hours. Love, in fact, does not in the least change woman's life, or give it new earnestness or a fresh direction; but it makes it infinitely more interesting, and it heightens the enjoyment of wasting a day by a new sense of power. For that brief space of triumph Phyllis is able to make Corydon waste his day too. The more he writhes and wriggles under the compulsion, the more lingering looks he casts back on the work he has quitted, the greater her victory.

He cannot decently confess that he is tired of the little comedy in which he takes so romantic a part, and certainly his fellow actress will not help him to the confession. By dint of acting it, indeed, she comes at last to a certain belief in her role. She really imagines herself to be very busy, to have sacrificed her leisure as well as her heart to the object of her devotion. She scolds him for his backwardness in not more thoroughly sacrificing his leisure to her. Work may be very important to him, but it is of less importance to the self-sacrificing being who hasn't had one moment to finish the third volume of the last sensational novel since she plighted her troth to this monster of ingratitude! Of course a man likes to be flattered, and does as much as he can in the way of believing in the little comedy too; in fact, it is all amazingly graceful and entertaining on the one side and on the other. Our only doubt is whether this graceful and entertaining mode of interrupting all the serious business of life will not be treated rather mercilessly by enfranchised woman. How will the enchantment of passion survive when the object of our adoration can only spare us an hour from her medical cases, or defers an interview because she is choked with fresh briefs? One of two results must clearly follow. Either the great Westminster philosopher is right, and love will play a far less important part than it has done in human affairs, or else it will concentrate itself, and take a far more intense and passionate character than it exhibits now.

We can quite conceive that the very difficulty of the new relations may give them a new fire and vigor, and that the women of the future, looking back on the old months of indolent coquetry, may feel a certain contempt for souls which can fritter away the grandeur of passion as they fritter away the grandeur of life. But even the gain of passion will hardly compensate us for the loss of variety. All this playing with love has a certain pretty independence about it, and leaves woman's individuality where it found it. Passion must of necessity whirl both beings, in the unity of a common desire, into one. And so we get back to the old problem of the monotony of life. But it is just this monotonous identity to which civilization, politics, and society are all visibly tending. Railways will tunnel Alps for us, democracy will extinguish heroes, and raise mankind to a general level of commonplace respectability; woman's enfranchisement will level the social world, and leave between sex and sex the difference—even if it leaves that—of a bonnet.



COSTUME AND ITS MORALS.

Nothing is more decisively indicative of the real value or necessity of a thing than the fact that, while its presence is hardly noticeable, it is immediately missed and asked for when it disappears; and it is thus that the paramount importance of clothing asserts itself by the conspicuousness of its absence. Of course the first purpose of dress is, or should be, decency, and for this, quantity rather than quality is looked for. But, as with the little cloud no larger than a man's hand, so from the primary fig-leaf or first element of dress, how great things have arisen! In respect of amplification, dress may be said to have attained its maximum when men wore ruffs which nearly concealed their heads, and shoes a quarter of a yard longer than their feet; but "fashion" has its day, and now dress threatens to dwindle into something not far from its original or fig-leaf dimensions.

Another perfectly legitimate object of dress is attractiveness, so that by its aid our persons may be set off to the best advantage; dress should also be individual and symbolic, so as to indicate clearly the position and character which we desire to obtain and hold. It is not of men's attire that we have now to speak; that has been settled for them by the tailors' strike, which practically ordained that he that was shabby should be shabby, or even shabbier still, and he that had allowed himself to be thrust into the straitened trousers and scanty coatee of last year should continue to exhibit his proportions long after the grotesqueness of his figure had been recognised even by himself.

But it is of the dress of our women that we are compelled to testify, and it can hardly be denied that at the present moment it offends grievously in three particulars. It is inadequate for decency; it lacks that truthfulness which is, and should be, the base of all that is attractive and beautiful; and in its symbolism it is in the highest degree objectionable, for it not only aims at what is unreal and false, but it simulates that which is positively hateful and meretricious, so that it is difficult now for even a practised eye to distinguish the high-born maiden or matron of Belgravia from the Anonymas who haunt the drive and fill our streets.

This indictment is, it may be said, a severe one; but if we examine, so far as male critics may venture to do, the costume of a fashionable woman of the day, it can hardly be said to be unjust. The apparent object of modern female dress is to assimilate its wearers as nearly as possible in appearance to women of a certain class—the class to which it was formerly hardly practicable to allude, and yet be intelligible to young ladies; but all that is changed, and the habits and customs of the women of the demi-monde are now studied as if they were indeed curious, but exceptionally admirable also, and thus a study unseemly and unprofitable has begotten a spirit of imitation which has achieved a degrading success.

"Our modest matrons meet," not "to stare the strumpet down," but to compare notes, to get hints, and to engage in a kind of friendly rivalry—in short, to pay that homage to Vice, and in a very direct way too, which Vice is said formerly to have paid to Virtue. Paint and powder are of course the first requisites for the end in view, and these adjuncts have to be laid on with such skill as the debutante or her toilette-maid possesses, which is sometimes so small as to leave their handiwork disgustingly coarse and apparent.

There are pearl-powder, violet-powder, rouge, bistre for the eyelids, belladonna for the eyes, whitelead and blacklead, yellow dye and mineral acids for the hair—all tending to the utter destruction of both hair and skin. The effect of this "diaphanous" complexion and "aurified" hair (we borrow the expressions) in a person intended by nature to be dark, or swarthy, is most comical; sometimes the whitelead is used so unsparingly that it has quite a blue tint, which glistens until the face looks more like a death's head anointed with phosphorus and oil for theatrical purposes than the head of a Christian gentlewoman. It may be interesting to know, and we have the information from high, because soi-disant fashionable authority, that the reign of golden locks and blue-white visages is drawing to a close, and that it is to be followed by bronze complexions and blue-black hair—a l'Africaine we presume.

When fashionable Madame has, to her own satisfaction, painted and varnished her face, she then proceeds, like Jezebel, to tire her head, and, whether she has much hair or little, she fixes on to the back of it a huge nest of coarse hair generally well baked in order to free it from the parasites with which it abounded when it first adorned the person of some Russian or North-German peasant girl. Of course this gives an unnaturally large and heavy appearance to the cerebellar region; but nature is not exactly what is aimed at, still less refinement.

If this style be not approved of, there is yet another fashion—namely, to cut the hair short in a crop, creper it, curl it, frizzle it, bleach it, burn it, and otherwise torture it until it has about as much life in it as last year's hay; and then to shampoo it, rumple it, and tousle it, until the effect is to produce the aspect of a madwoman in one of her worst fits. This method, less troublesome and costly than the other, may be considered even more striking, so that it is largely adopted by a number of persons who are rather disreputable, and poor. As is well known, not all of the asinine tribe wear asses' ears; nevertheless some of these votaries of dress find their ears too long, or too large, or ill-placed, or, what comes to the same thing, inconveniently placed, but a prettier or better-shaped pair are easily purchased, admirably moulded in gutta-percha or some other plastic material; they are delicately colored, fitted up with earrings and a spring apparatus, and they are then adjusted on to the head, the despised natural ears being of course carefully hidden from view.

It is long enough since a bonnet meant shelter to the face or protection to the head; that fragment of a bonnet which at present represents the head-gear, and which was some years ago worn on the back of the head and nape of the neck, is now poised on the front, and ornamented with birds, portions of beasts, reptiles, and insects. We have seen a bonnet composed of a rose and a couple of feathers, another of two or three butterflies or as many beads and a bit of lace, and a third represented by five green leaves joined at the stalks. A white or spotted veil is thrown over the visage, in order that the adjuncts that properly belong to the theatre may not be immediately detected in the glare of daylight; and thus, with diaphanous tinted face, large painted eyes, and stereotyped smile, the lady goes forth looking much more as if she had stepped out of the green room of a theatre, or from a Haymarket saloon, than from an English home.

But it is in evening costume that our women have reached the minimum of dress and the maximum of brass. We remember a venerable old lady whose ideas of decorum were such that in her speech all above the foot was ankle, and all below the chin was chest; but now the female bosom is less the subject of a revelation than the feature of an exposition, and charms that were once reserved are now made the common property of every looker on. A costume which has been described as consisting of a smock, a waistband, and a frill seems to exceed the bounds of honest liberality, and resembles most perhaps the attire mentioned by Rabelais, "nothing before and nothing behind, with sleeves of the same." Not very long ago two gentlemen were standing together at the Opera. "Did you ever see anything like that?" inquired one, with a significant glance, directing the eyes of his companion to the uncovered bust of a lady immediately below. "Not since I was weaned," was the suggestive reply. We are not aware whether the speaker was consciously or unconsciously reproducing a well-known archiepiscopal mot.

Though our neighbors are not strait-laced, so far as bathing-costume is concerned, they are less tolerant of the nude than we are in this highly-favored land. There was lately a story in one of the French papers that at a certain ball a lady was requested to leave the room because a chain of wrought gold, suspended from shoulder to shoulder, was the sole protection which it seemed to her well to wear on her bosom. To have made the toilette correspond throughout, the dress should have consisted of a crinoline skirt, which, though not so ornamental, would have been not less admirable and more effective.

Of course there are women to whom nature has been niggardly in the matter of roundness of form, but even these need not despair; if they cannot show their own busts, they can show something nearly as good, since we read the following, which we forbear to translate:—"Autre excentricite. C'est l'invention des poitrines adherentes a l'usage des dames trop etherees. Il s'agit d'un systeme en caoutchouc rose, qui s'adapte a la place vide comme une ventouse a, la peau, et qui suit les mouvements de la respiration avec une precision mathematique et parfaite."

Of those limbs which it is still forbidden to expose absolutely, the form and contour can at least be put in relief by insisting on the skirts being gored and straightened to the utmost; indeed, some of the riding-habits we have seen worn are in this respect so contrived that, when viewed from behind, especially when the wearer is not of too fairy-like proportions, they resemble a pair of tight trousers rather than the full flowing robe which we remember as so graceful and becoming to a woman. It will be observed that the general aim of all these adventitious aids is to give an impression of earth and the fullness thereof, to appear to have a bigger cerebellum, a more sensuous development of limb, and a greater abundance of flesh than can be either natural or true; but we are almost at a loss how to express the next point of ambition with which the female mind has become inspired.

The women who are not as those who love their lords wish to be—indeed, as we have heard, those who have no lords of their own to love—have conceived the notion that, by simulating an "interesting condition" (we select the phrase accepted as the most delicate), they will add to their attractions; and for this purpose an article of toilet—an india-rubber anterior bustle—called the demi-temps, has been invented, and is worn beneath the dress, nominally to make the folds fall properly, but in reality, as the name betrays, to give the appearance of a woman advanced in pregnancy.

No person will be found to say that the particular condition, when real, is unseemly or ridiculous. What it is when assumed, and for such a purpose—whether it is not all that and something worse—we leave our readers to decide for themselves. It is said that one distinguished personage first employed crinoline in order to render more graceful her appearance while in this situation; but these ladies with their ridiculous demi-temps, without excuse as without shame, travesty nature in their own persons in a way which a low-comedy actress would be ashamed to do in a tenth-rate theatre. The name is French, let us hope the idea is also; and this reminds us of the title of a little piece lately played in Paris by amateurs for some charitable purpose—Il n'y a plus d'enfants. No; in France they may indeed say, "It is true il n'y a plus d'enfants, but then have we not invented the demi-temps?"

And if each separate point of female attire and decoration is a sham, so the whole is often a deception and a fraud. It is not true that by taking thought one cannot add a cubit to one's stature, for ladies, by taking thought about it, do add, if not a cubit, at least considerably, to their height, which, like almost everything about them, is often unreal. With high heels, toupe, and hat, we may calculate that about four or five inches are altogether borrowed for the occasion. Thus it comes to be a grave matter of doubt, when a man marries, how much is real of the woman who has become his wife, or how much of her is her own only in the sense that she has bought, and possibly may have paid for it. To use the words of an old writer, "As with rich furred conies, their cases are far better than their bodies; and, like the bark of a cinnamon-tree, which is dearer than the whole bulk, their outward accoutrements are far more precious than their inward endowments."

Of the wife elect, her bones, her debts, and her caprices may be the only realities which she can bestow on her husband. All the rest—hair, teeth, complexion, ears, bosom, figure, including the demi-temps—are alike an imposition and a falsehood. In such case we should recommend, for the sake of both parties, that during at least the wedding-tour, the same precautions should be observed as when Louis XV. travelled with "the unblushing Chateauroux with her bandboxes and rougepots at his side, so that at every new station a wooden gallery had to be run up between their lodgings."

It may be said that in all this we are ungenerous and ungrateful, and that in discussing the costume of women we are touching on a question which pertains to women more than to men. But is that so? Are we not by thus exposing what is false, filthy, and meretricious, seeking to lead what was once dignified by the name of "the fair sex" from a course alike unbecoming and undignified to one more worthy of the sex and its attributes? Most men like to please women, and most women like to please men. For, as has been well said, "Pour plaire aux femmes il faut etre considere des hommes, et pour etre considere des hommes il faut savoir plaire aux femmes."

We have a right to suppose that women do not adopt a fashion or a costume unless they suppose that it will add to their attractions in general, and possibly also please men in particular. This being so, it may be well to observe that these fashions do not please or attract men, for we know they are but the inventions of some vulgar, selfish perruquier or modiste. We may add that if we want to study the nude we can do so in the sculpture galleries, or among the Tableaux Vivants, at our ease; and that for well-bred or well-educated and well-born women, or even for only fashionable and fast women, to approximate in their manners, habits, and dress to the members of the demi-monde is a mistake, and a grievous one, if they wish to be really and adequately appreciated by men whose good opinion, if not more, they would desire to possess.



THE FADING FLOWER.

If there is any part of man's conduct which proves more conclusively than another the baseness of his ingratitude, it is his indifference to the Fading Flower. Woman may well wonder at the charm which prostrates the heavy Guardsman at the feet of the belle of the season. Even the most ardent of worshippers at such a shrine must, one would think, desire in their deity a little more sweetness and light. But the beauty of eighteen summers is trained to look on worship as simply her due, and to regard amiability as a mere superfluity. She knows she can summon an adorer by one beckon of her fan, and dismiss him by another. A bow will repay the most finished of pretty speeches, and conversation can be conducted at the least possible expense by the slight trouble of recollecting who was at Lady A.'s ball, and the yet slighter trouble of guessing who is likely to be at Lady C.'s.

It is utterly needless to bestow any labor on society when society takes it as a crowning favor to be suffered simply to adore. There is a certain grandeur, therefore, of immobility about the English beauty, a statuesque perfection which no doubt has great merits of its own. But it must be owned that it is not amusing, and that it is only the intensity of our worship which saves us from feeling it to be dull. Beauty is apt to be a little heavy on the stairs. A shade of distress flits over the loveliest of faces if we stray for a moment beyond the happy hunting-grounds of the ball-room or the Opera, the last Academy or the next Horticultural. Beautiful beings are made, they feel, not to amuse, but to be amused. The one object of their enthusiasm is the "funny Bishop" who turns a great debate into a jest for the entertainment of his fair friends in the Ladies' Gallery. The object of their social preference is the young wit who lounges up to tell his last little story, and then, without boring them for a reply, lounges away again. The debt which they owe to society is simply the morning ride which keeps them blooming through the season. The debt which society owes to them is that eternal succession of gay nothings which keeps London in a whirl till the grouse are ready for the sacrifice. In a word, woman in her earlier stages is simply receptive.

Light and sweetness come in with the Fading Flower. It is when the shy retreat of the elder sons makes way for the shyer approach of their younger brothers that woman becomes fragrant and intelligent. The old indifference quickens into a subdued vivacity; Hermione descends from her pedestal and warms into flesh and blood. She turns chatty, and her chat insensibly deepens into conversation. She discovers a new interest in life and in the last novel of the season. She ventures on the confines of poetry, and if she does not read Mr. Tennyson's Lucretius, she keeps his photograph in her album. She flings herself with a far greater ardor into the mysteries of croquet. She has been known to garden. As petal after petal floats down to earth she becomes artistic. She reads, she talks Mr. Ruskin. She has her own views on Venice and its Doges, her enthusiasm over Alps and artisans. The slow approach of autumn brings her to politics. She is deep in Mr. Disraeli's novels, and quotes Mr. Gladstone's Homer. She speculates on Charlie's chances for the county. She knows why the Home Secretary was absent from the last division. The drop of another petal warns her further afield. She is manly now; she comes in at breakfast with her hair about her ears, and a tale of the gallop she has had across country. She takes you over the farm, and laughs at your ignorance of pigs. She peeps into the odoriferous sanctum upstairs, and owns to a taste for cigarettes. She is slightly horsey, and knows to a pound the value of her mare. Another season, and she is interested in Church questions, and inquires what is the next "new thing" at St. Andrew's. She adores Lord Shaftesbury, or works frontals for St. Gogmagog. She collects for the Irish missions, or misses an entree on Eves. It is only as woman fades that we realize the versatility, the inexhaustible resources, of woman.

The one scene, however, where the Fading Flower is perhaps seen at her best is the County Archaeological Meeting. Of all rural delusions this is perhaps the pleasantest, and if the name is forbidding, the Fading Flower knows how little there is in a name. About half a dozen old gentlemen, of course, take the thing in grand earnest. It is beyond measure amusing to peep over the learned Secretary's shoulder, to see the gray heads wagging and the spectacles in full play over the list of promised papers, to watch the carefully planned details, the solemn array of morning meetings, the grave excursions from abbey to castle, from castle to church, the graver soirees where Dryasdust revels amidst armor and knicknackery. It is even more amusing to see the Fading Flower step in at the close of this learned preparation, and with a woman's alchemy turn all this dust to gold. A little happy audacity converts the morning meetings into convenient gatherings for the groups of the day, the excursion resolves itself into a refined picnic, the learned soiree becomes a buzzing conversazione.

Those who look forward with interest to woman's entrance into our Universities may gather something of the results to be expected from such a step in the fields of rural archaeology. Her very presence at the meeting throws an air of gentle absurdity over the whole affair. It is difficult for the driest of antiquaries to read a paper on Roman roads in the teeth of a charming being who sleeps to the close, and then awakes only to assure him it was "very romantic." But it must be confessed that the charming being has very little trouble with the antiquaries. Half the fun of the thing lies in the ease and grace of her taming of Dryasdust; the learned Professor dies at her touch into "a dear delightful old thing," and fetches and carries all day with a perfect obedience. It is a delightful change from town, a sort of glorified afternoon in a pastoral Zoological, this junketing among the queer unclubbable animals of science and history. There is a noble disdain of rheumatism in the ardor with which they plunge into the dark and mysterious vaults where their willful student insists, with Mr. Froude, that those poor monks snatched their damp and difficult slumber; and there is a noble disdain of truth in their suppression of the treacherous and unsentimental "beer-cellar" which trembles on their lips.

Woman, in fact, carries her atmosphere of romantic credulity into the gray and arid scepticism of a groping archaeology. She frowns down any suggestion of the improbability of a pretty story, she believes in the poison-sucking devotion of Queen Eleanor, she shrugs her shoulders impatiently at a whisper of Queen Mary's wig. Every kitchen becomes a torture-chamber, every drain a subterranean passage. But resolute as she is on this point of the poetry of the past, on all other questions she is the most docile of pupils. Her interest, her listening power, her curiosity, is inexhaustible. If she has a passion, indeed, it is for Early English. But she has a proper awe for Romanesque, and a singular interest in Third Pointed. She is ruthless in insisting on her victim's spelling out every word of a brass in Latin that she cannot understand, and which he cannot translate. She collects little fragments of Roman brick, and wraps them up in tissue-paper for preservation at home like bride-cake. She is severe on restoration, and merciless on whitewash. She plunges, in fact, gallantly into the spirit of the thing, but she gracefully denudes it of its bareness and pedantry. Her bugle sings truce at midday for luncheon. She couches in the deep grass of the abbey ruins, and gathers in picturesque groups beneath castle walls. A flutter of silks, a ripple of feminine laughter, distract the audience from graver disquisitions. It is difficult to discuss the exact date of a moulding when soda-water bottles are popping beneath one's antiquarian nose.

After all, archaeologists are men, and sandwiches are sandwiches. It is at that moment perhaps that the Fading Flower is at her best. Her waning attractions are heightened artistically by the background of old fogies. Her sentiment blends with the poetry of the ruins around. The young squire, the young parson, who have been yawning under the prose of Dryasdust, find refreshment in the gay prattle of archaeological woman. The sun too is overpowering, and a pretty woman leaning on one's arm in the leafy recesses of a ruined castle is sometimes more overpowering than the sun. There is much in the romance of the occasion. There is a little perhaps in the champagne. At any rate the Fading Flower blooms often into matronly life under the kindly influences of archaeological meetings, and antiquarian studies flourish gaily under the patronage of woman.

There is a certain melancholy in tracing further the career of the Fading Flower. We long to arrest it at each of these picturesque stages, as we long to arrest the sunset in its lovelier moments of violet and gold. But the sunset dies into the gray of eve, and woman sets with the same fatal persistency. The evanescent tints fade into the gray. Woman becomes hard, angular, colorless. Her floating sentiment, so graceful in its mobility, curdles into opinions. Her conversation, so charmingly impalpable, solidifies into discussion. Her character, like her face, becomes rigid and osseous. She entrenches herself in the 'ologies. She works pinafores for New-Zealanders in the May Meetings, and appears in wondrous bonnets at the Church Congress. She adores Mr. Kingsley because he is earnest, and groans over the triviality of the literature of the day. She takes up the grievances of her sex, and badgers the puzzled overseer who has omitted to place her name on the register. She pronounces old men fogies, and young men intolerable. She throws out dark hints of her intention to compose a great work which shall settle everything. Then she bursts into poetry, and pens poems of so fiery a passion that her family are in consternation lest she should elope with the half-pay officer who meets her by moonlight on the pier. Then she plunges into science, and cuts her hair short to be in proper trim for Professor Huxley's lectures.

For awhile she startles her next neighbor at dinner with speculations on molluscs, and questions as to the precise names of the twelve hundred new species of fish that Professor Agassiz has caught in the river Orinoco. There is a more terrible stage when she becomes heretical, subscribes to the support of Mr. Tonneson and pities the poor Bishop of Natal. But from this she is commonly saved by the deepening of eve. Little by little all this restless striving against the monotony of her existence dies down into calm. The gray of life hushes the Fading Flower into the kindly aunt, the patient nurse, the gentle friend of the poor. It is hard to recognise the proud beauty, the vivacious flirt, the sentimental poetess of days gone by in the practical little woman who watches by Harry's sick-bed or hurries off with blankets and broth down the lane. In some such peace the Fading Flower commonly finds her rest—a peace unromantic, utilitarian, and yet not perhaps unbeautiful. She has found—as she tells us—her work at last; and yet in the life that seems so profitless she has been doing a work after all. She has at any rate vindicated her sex against the charge of what Mr. Arnold calls Hebraism. She has displayed in Hellenic roundness the completeness of the nature of woman.

Compared with the quick transitions, with the endless variety of her life, the life of man seems narrow and poor. There is hardly a phase of human thought, of human action, which she has not touched, and she has never touched but to adorn. If she has faded, she has revealed a new power and beauty and fragrance at each stage in her decay. Nothing in her life has proved so becoming as her leaving it. The song of ingenuity, of triumph, of defence, which has run along the course of her decline, softens at its close into a swan-song of peace and gentleness and true womanhood.



LA FEMME PASSEE.

Without doubt it is a time of trial to all women, more or less painful according to individual disposition, when they first begin to grow old and lose their good looks. Youth and beauty make up so much of their personal value, so much of their natural raison d'etre, that when these are gone many feel as if their whole career was at an end, and as if nothing was left to them now that they are no longer young enough to be loved as girls are loved, or pretty enough to be admired as once they were admired. For women of a certain position have so little wholesome occupation, and so little ambition for anything, save, indeed, that miserable thing called "getting on in society," that they cannot change their way of life with advancing years; they do not attempt to find interest in things outside themselves, and independent of the mere personal attractiveness which in youth constituted their whole pleasure of existence. This is essentially the case with fashionable women, who have staked their all on appearance, and to whom good looks are of more account than noble deeds; and, accordingly, the struggle to remain young is a frantic one with them, and as degrading as it is frantic.

With the ideal woman of middle age—that pleasant woman, with her happy face and softened manner, who unites the charms of both epochs, retaining the ready responsiveness of youth while adding the wider sympathies of experience—with her there has never been any such struggle to make herself an anachronism. Consequently she remains beautiful to the last, far more beautiful than all the paste and washes in Madame Rachel's shop could make her. Sometimes, if rarely in these latter days, we meet her in society, where she carries with her an atmosphere of her own—an atmosphere of honest, wholesome truth and love, which makes every one who enters it better and purer for the time. All children and all young persons love her, because she understands and loves them. For she is essentially a mother—that is, a woman who can forget herself, who can give without asking to receive, and who, without losing any of the individualism which belongs to self-respect, can yet live for and in the lives of others, and find her best joy in the well-being of those about her. There is no servility, no exaggerated sacrifice in this; it is simply the fulfillment of woman's highest duty—the expression of that grand maternal instinct which need not necessarily include the fact of personal maternity, but which must find utterance in some line of unselfish action with all women worthy of the name.

The ideal woman of middle age understands the young because she has lived with them. If a mother, she has performed her maternal duties with cheerfulness and love. There has been no giving up her nursery to the care of a hired servant who is expected to do for twenty pounds a year what the tremendous instinct of a mother's love could not find strength to do. When she had children, she attended to them in great part herself, and learnt all about their tempers, their maladies, and the best methods of management; as they grew up she was still the best friend they had, the Providence of their young lives who gave them both care and justice, both love and guidance. Such a manner of life has forced her to forget herself. When her child lay ill, perhaps dying, she had no heart and no time to think of her own appearance, and whether this dressing-gown was more becoming than that; and what did the doctor think of her with her hair pushed back from her face; and what a fright she must have looked in the morning light after her sleepless night of watching. The world and all its petty pleasures and paltry pains faded away in the presence of the stern tragedy of the hour; and not the finest ball of the season seemed to be worth a thought compared to the all-absorbing question whether her child slept after his draught and whether he ate his food with better appetite.

And such a life, in spite of all its cares, has kept her young as well as unselfish; we should rather say, young because unselfish. As she comes into the room with her daughters, her kindly face unpolluted by paint, her dress picturesque or fashionable according to her taste, but decent in form and consistent in tone with her age, it is often remarked that she looks more like their sister than their mother. This is because she is in harmony with her age, and has not, therefore, put herself in rivalry with them; and harmony is the very keystone of beauty. Her hair may be streaked with white, the girlish firmness and transparency of her skin has gone, the pearly clearness of her eye is clouded, and the slender grace of line is lost, but for all that she is beautiful, and she is intrinsically young. What she has lost in outside material charm—in that mere beaute da diable of youth—she has gained in character and expression; and, not attempting to simulate the attractiveness of a girl, she keeps what nature gave her—the attractiveness of middle age. And as every epoch has its own beauty, if woman would but learn that truth, she is as beautiful now as a matron of fifty, because in harmony with her years, and because her beauty has been carried on from matter to spirit, as she was when a maiden of sixteen. This is the ideal woman of middle age, met with even yet at times in society—the woman whom all men respect, whom all women envy, and wonder how she does it, and whom all the young adore, and wish they had for an elder sister or an aunt. And the secret of it all lies in truth, in love, in purity, and in unselfishness.

Standing far in front of this sweet and wholesome idealization is la femme passee of to-day—the reality as we meet with it at balls and fetes and afternoon at homes, ever foremost in the mad chase after pleasure, for which alone she seems to think she has been sent into the world. Dressed in the extreme of youthful fashion, her thinning hair dyed and crimped and fired till it is more like red-brown tow than hair, her flaccid cheeks ruddled, her throat whitened, her bust displayed with unflinching generosity, as if beauty was to be measured by cubic inches, her lustreless eyes blackened round the lids, to give the semblance of limpidity to the tarnished whites—perhaps the pupil dilated by belladonna, or perhaps a false and fatal brilliancy for the moment given by opium, or by eau de cologne, of which she has a store in her carriage, and drinks as she passes from ball to ball; no kindly drapery of lace or gauze to conceal the breadth of her robust maturity, or to soften the dreadful shadows of her leanness—there she stands, the wretched creature who will not consent to grow old, and who will still affect to be like a fresh coquettish girl when she is nothing but la femme passee, la femme passee et ridicule into the bargain.

There is not a folly for which even the thoughtlessness of youth is but a poor excuse into which she, in all the plenitude of her abundant experience, does not plunge. Wife and mother as she may be, she flirts and makes love as if an honorable issue was as open to her as to her daughter, or as if she did not know to what end flirting and making love lead in all ages. If we watch the career of such a woman, we see how, by slow but very sure degrees, she is obliged to lower the standard of her adorers, and to take up at last with men of inferior social position, who are content to buy her patronage by their devotion. To the best men of her own class she can give nothing that they value; so she barters with snobs, who go into the transaction with their eyes open, and take the whole affair as a matter of exchange, and quid pro quo rigidly exacted. Or she does really dazzle some very young and low born man who is weak as well as ambitious, and who thinks the fugitive regard of a middle-aged woman of high rank something to be proud of and boasted about. That she is as old as his own mother—at this moment selling tapes behind a village counter, or gathering up the eggs in a country farm—tells nothing against the association with him; and the woman who began her career of flirtation with the son of a duke ends it with the son of a shopkeeper, having between these two terms spanned all the several degrees of degradation which lie between giving and buying.

She cannot help herself; for it is part of the insignia of her artificial youth to have the reputation of a love affair, or the pretence of one, if even the reality is a mere delusion. When such a woman as this is one of the matrons, and consequently one of the leaders of society, what can we expect from the girls? What worse example could be given to the young? When we see her with her own daughters we feel instinctively that she is the most disastrous adviser they could have; and when in the company of girls or young married women not belonging to her, we doubt whether we ought not to warn their natural guardians against allowing such associations, for all that her standing in society is undeniable, and not a door is shut against her. We may have no absolutely tangible reason to give for our distaste beyond the self-evident facts that she paints her face and dyes her hair, dresses in a very decollete style, and affects a girlish manner that is out of harmony with her age and condition. But though we cannot formularize reasons, we have instincts; and sometimes instinct sees more clearly than reason.

What good in life does this kind of woman do? All her time is taken up, first, in trying to make herself look twenty or thirty years younger than she is, and then in trying to make others believe the same; and she has neither thought nor energy to spare from this, to her, far more important work than is feeding the hungry or nursing the sick, rescuing the fallen or soothing the sorrowful. The final cause of her existence seems to be the impetus she has given to a certain branch of trade manufacture—unless we add to this, the corruption of society. For whom, but for her, are the "little secrets" which are continually being advertised as woman's social salvation—regardless of grammar! The "eaux noire, brun, et chatain, which dyes the hair any shade in one minute;" the "kohhl for the eyelids;" the "blanc de perle," and "rouge de Lubin"—which does not wash off; the "bleu pour les veines;" the "rouge of eight shades," and "the sympathetic blush," which are cynically offered for the use and adoption of our mothers and daughters, find their chief patroness in the femme passee who makes herself up—the middle-aged matron engaged in her frantic struggle against time, and obstinately refusing to grow old in spite of all that nature may say or do.

Bad as the girl of the period often is, this horrible travesty of her vices in the modern matron is even worse. Indeed, were it not for her, the girls would never have gone to such lengths as those to which they have gone; for elder women have naturally immense influence over younger ones, and if mothers were to set their faces resolutely against the follies of the day, daughters would and must give in. As it is, they go even ahead of the young, and by example on the one hand and rivalry on the other, sow the curse of corruption broadcast where they were meant to have only a pure influence and to set a wise example. Were it not for those who still remain faithful, women who regard themselves as appointed by God the trustees for humanity and virtue, the world would go to ruin forthwith; but so long as the five righteous are left we have hope, and a certain amount of security for the future, when the present disgraceful madness of society shall have subsided.



PRETTY PREACHERS.

To beings of the rougher sex—let us honestly confess it—one of the most charming of those ever-recurrent surprises which the commonest incidents of the holidays never fail to afford is the surprise of finding themselves at church. Whatever the cause may be, whether we owe our new access of devotion to the early breakfast and the boredom of a bachelor morning, or to the moral compulsion of the cunning display of prayer-books and hymnals in the hall, or to the temptation of that chattiest and gayest of all walks—the walk to church—or to an uneasy conscience that spurs us to set a good example to the coachman, or to a sheer impulse of courtesy to the rector, certain it is that a week after we have been lounging at the club-window, and wondering how all the good people get through their Sunday morning, we find ourselves safely boxed in the family pew, and chorusing the family "Amen!"

No doubt much of our new temper springs simply from the change of scene, and if the first week in the country were a time for self-analysis we might amuse ourselves with observing what a sudden simplicity of taste may be gained simply by a rush from town. There is a pleasant irony in being denounced from pulpit and platform as jaded voluptuaries, and then finding ourselves able to trample through coppices and plunge into cowsheds as if we had never seen a cowshed or a coppice before. But there is more than the pleasure of surprise in the peculiar rural development of attendance at church. Piety brings its own reward. We find ourselves invested with a new domestic interest, and brought into far closer and warmer domestic relations. Mamma looks a great deal more benignant than usual, and the girls lean on one's arm with a more trustful confidence and a deeper sympathy.

A new bond of family union has been found in that victory of the pew over the club-window. But earthly pleasure is always dashed with a little disappointment, and one drop of bitterness lingers in the cup of joy. If only Charlie and papa would remain awake during the sermon! They are so good in the Psalms, so attentive through the Lessons, so sternly responsive to each Commandment, that it is sad to see them edging towards the comfortable corners with the text, and fast asleep under the application. Then, too, there is so little hope of reform, not merely because on this point men are utterly obdurate, but because it is impossible for their reformers even to understand their obduracy. For with both the whole question is a pure question of sympathy. Men sleep under sermons because the whole temper of their minds, as they grow into a larger culture, drifts further and further from the very notion of preaching. Inquiry, quiet play of thought, a somewhat indolent appreciation of the various sides of every subject, an appetite for novelty, a certain shrinking from the definite, a certain pleasure in the vague—these characteristics of modern minds are hardly characteristics of the pulpit. There are, of course, your drawing-room spouters, who can reel off an artistic or poetic or critical discourse of any length on the rug. But, as a rule, men neither like to pump upon their kind nor to be pumped upon. They like a quiet, genial talk which turns over everything and settles nothing. They like to put their case, to put their objection, but they like both to be brief and tentative. As a rule they talk with their guard up, and say nothing about their deeper thoughts or feelings. They vote a man who airs his emotions to be as great a bore as the man with a dogma, or the man with a hobby. A sermon, therefore, from the very necessities of its structure, is the very type of the sort of talk that revolts men most.

On the other hand, women really enjoy preaching. Mamma's reply to the natural inquiry as to the goodness of the sermon—"My dear, all sermons are good"—is something more than a matronly snub, it is the inner conviction of woman. She likes, not merely a talk, but a good long talk. She likes being abused. She likes being dogmatized over and intellectually trampled on. In fact, she has very little belief in the intellect. But then she has an immense faith in the heart. She lives in a world of affections and sympathies. She has her little tale of passion in the past that she tells over to herself in the dusk of the autumn evening. She believes that the world at large is moved by those impulses of love and dislike that play so great a part in her own. And then, too, she has her practical house-keeping side, and likes her religion done up in neat little parcels of "heads" and "considerations" and "applications," and handed over the counter for immediate use. And so while papa quarrels with the rector's forty minutes, his indiscriminate censure of a world utterly unknown to him, his declamation against Pusey or Colenso, or while Charlie laughs over his rhetoric and his sentiment, woman listens a little sadly and wearily, and longs for a golden age when husbands will love sermons and men understand clergymen.

It is just from this theological deadlock that we are freed by the Pretty Preacher. If the world laughs at the Reverend Olympia Brown, it is not because she preaches, but because she prisons herself in a pulpit. The sure evidence that woman is to become the preacher of the future is that woman is the only preacher men listen to. It is hard to imagine any bribe short of the National Debt that would have induced us to listen through the dog-days of the last few weeks to the panting rhetoric of Mr. Spurgeon. But it is harder to imagine the bribe that would have roused us to flight as we lay beneath the plane-tree, and listened to the cool ripple of the Pretty Preacher. Of course it is a mere phase in the life of woman, a short interval between the dawn and the night. There is an exquisite piquancy in the raw, shy epigrams of the abrupt little dogmatist who is just out of her teens. Her very want of training and science gives a novelty to her hits that makes her formidable in the ring. No doubt, too, as we have owned before, there is a faint and delicate attraction about the Fading Flower of later years that at certain times and places makes it not impossible to sit under her.

But the sphere of the Pretty Preacher lies really between these extremes. She is not at war with mankind, like the nymph of bread and butter; nor does mankind suspect her of subtle designs in her discourse as it suspects the elder homilist. Her talk is just as easy and graceful and natural as herself, and, moreover, it is always in season. She never suffers a serious reflection to interfere with the whirl of town. She quite sees the absurdity of a sermon at a five o'clock tea. No one is freer from the boredom of a long talk when there is a chance of a boat or a ride. But there are moments when one is too hot, or too tired, or too lazy for chat or exertion, and such moments are the moments of the Pretty Preacher. The first week of the holidays is especially her own. There is a physical pleasure in doing, thinking, saying nothing. The highest reach of human effort consists in disentangling a skein of silk for her, or turning over Dore's hideous sketches for the Idyls. At such a moment there is a freshness as of cool waters in the accents of the Pretty Preacher. She does not plunge into the deepest themes at once. She leads her listener gently on, up the slopes of art or letters or politics, to the higher peaks where her purely dogmatic mission begins. She is artistic, and she labors to wake the idler at her feet to higher views of beauty and art. She points out the tinting of the distant hills, she quotes Ruskin, she criticizes Millais. She crushes her auditor with a sense of his ignorance, of the base unpoetic view of things with which he lounged through the last Academy. What she longs for in English art is nobleness of purpose, and we smile bitter scorn in the sunshine at the ignoble artist who suffers a thought of his butcher's bills to penetrate into the studio. If we could only stretch the Royal Academicians beside us on the grass, what a thrill and an emotion would run through those elderly gentlemen as they listened to the indignation of the Pretty Preacher.

But art shades off into literature, and literature into poetry. We are driven into a confession that we enjoy the frivolous articles that those horrid papers have devoted to her sex. Is there nothing, the Pretty Preacher asks us solemnly, to be said against our own? And the sun is hot, and we are speechless. It was shameful of us to put down the Spanish Gipsy, and let it return unfinished to Mudie's! Never did rebuke so fill us with shame at our want of imagination and of poesy. But already the Preacher has passed to politics, and is deep in Mr. Mill's prophecies of coming events. She is severe on the triviality of the House, or the quarrelsome debates of the past Session. She passes by our murmured excuse of the weather, and dwells with a temperate enthusiasm on the fact that the next will be a social Parliament. Do we know anything about the Poor-laws or Education or Trades'-societies? Have we subscribed to Mr. Mill's election? We plead poverty, but the miserable plea dies away on the contemptuous air.

What our Pretty Preacher would like above all things would be to meet that dear Mr. Shaw Lefevre, and thank him for his efforts to protect woman. But she knows we are utterly heretical on the subject; she doubts very much whether we take in the Victoria Magazine. We listen as the Tory Mayor of Birmingham listened to Mr. Bright at his banquet. The politics are not ours, and the literature is not ours, and the art is not ours; but it is pleasant to lie in the sunshine and hear it all so charmingly put by the Pretty Preacher. We own that sermons have a little to say for themselves; above all, that the impossibility of replying to them has its advantages in a case like this. It would be absurd to discuss these matters with the Pretty Preacher, but it is delightful to look up and see the kindling little face and listen to the sermon.

It is, however, as the theologian proper, as the moralist and divine, that we love her most. She arrives at this peak at last. As a rule, she chooses the tritest topics, but she gives them a novelty and grace of her own. Even Thackeray's old "Vanity of Vanities" wakes into new life as she dexterously couples it with the dances of the last season. We nod our applause from the grass as she denounces the worthlessness and frivolity of the life we lead. If the weather were cool enough we should at once vow, as she exhorts us, to be earnest and great and good. Above all, let us be noble. The Pretty Preacher is great on self-sacrifice. She sent two of her spoilt dresses to those poor people in the East-end, after listening to a whole sermon on their sufferings. The congregation at her feet feels a twinge of remorse at the thought of his inhumanity, and swears he will put down his segars and devote the proceeds to the emigration fund. Does he ever read Keble? There is a slight struggle in the unconverted mind, and a faint whisper that he now and then reads Tupper; but it is too hot to be flippant, or to do more than swear eternal allegiance to the Christian Year.

The evening deepens, and the sermon deepens with it. It is one of the most disgusting points about the divine in the pulpit that he is always boasting of himself as a man like as we are, and of the sins he denounces as sins of his own. It is the special charm of the fair divine above us that she is eminently a being not as we are, but one serene, angelic, pure. It is the very vagueness of her condemnation that tells on us—the utter ignorance of what is so familiar to us that the vagueness betrays, the utter unskillfulness of the hits, and the purity that makes them so unskillful. It is only when she descends to particulars that we can turn round on the Pretty Preacher—only when a burning and impassioned invective against Cider Cellars suddenly softens into the plaintive inquiry, "But, oh, Charlie, dear, what are the Cider Cellars?" So long as the preacher keeps in the sphere of the indefinite, we lie at her mercy, and hear the soft thunders roll resistlessly overhead.

But then they are soft thunders. We feel almost encouraged, like Luther, to "sin boldly" when the absolving fingers brush lightly over our cousinly hair. Our censor, too, has faith in us, in our capacity and will for better things, and it is amazingly pleasant to have the assurance confirmed by a squeeze from the gentle theologian's hand. And so night comes down, and preacher and penitent stroll pleasantly home together, and mamma wonders where both can have been; and the Pretty Preacher lays her head on her pillow with the sweet satisfaction that her mission is accomplished, and that a reprobate soul—the soul, too, of such a gentlemanly and agreeable reprobate—is won.



SPOILT WOMEN.

Like children and all soft things, women are soon spoilt if subjected to unwholesome conditions. Sometimes the spoiling comes from over-harshness, sometimes from over-indulgence; what we are speaking of to-day is the latter condition—the spoiling which comes from being petted and given way to and indulged, till they think themselves better than everybody else, and as if living under laws made specially for them alone. Men get spoilt too in the same manner; but for the most part there is a tougher fibre in them, which resists the flabby influences of flattery and exaggerated attention better than can the morale of the weaker sex; and, besides, even arbitrary men meet with opposition in certain directions, and the most self-contented social autocrat knows that his humblest adherents criticise though they dare not oppose.

A man who has been spoilt by success and a gratified ambition, so that he thinks himself a small Alexander in his own way, and able to conquer any obstacles which may present themselves, has a certain high-handed activity of will about him that does not interfere with his duties in life; he is not made fretful and impatient and exigeant as a woman is—as if he alone of all mankind is to be exempt from misfortune and annoyances; as if his friends must never die, his youth never fade, his circumstances run always smoothly, protected by the care of others from all untoward hitch; and as if time and tide, which wait for no one else, are to be bound to him as humble servants dutifully observant of his wishes.

The useful art of "finding his level," which he learnt at school and in his youth generally, keeps him from any very weak manifestation of being spoilt; save, indeed, when he has been spoilt by women at home, nursed up by an adoring wife, and a large circle of wife's sisters almost as adoring, to all of whom his smallest wishes are religious obligations, and his faintest virtues godly graces, and who vie with each other which of them shall wait upon him most servilely, flatter him most outrageously, pet and coax and coddle him most entirely, and so do him the largest amount of spiritual damage, and unfit him most thoroughly for the worth and work of masculine life. A man subjected to this insidious injury is simply ruined so far as any real manliness of nature goes. He is made into that sickening creature, "a sweet being," as the women call him—a woman's man, with flowing hair and a turn for poetry, full of highflown sentiment, and morbidly excited sympathies; a man almost as much woman as man, who has no backbone of ambition in him, but who puts his whole life into love, just as women do, and who becomes at last emphatically not worth his salt.

Bad as it is for a man to be kowtowed by men, it is not so bad, because not so weakening, as the domestic idolatry which sometimes goes on when one man is the centre of a large family of women, and the only object upon which the natural feminine instinct can expend itself. No greater damage can be done to a man than is done by this kind of domestic idolatry. But, in truth, the evil is too pleasant to be resisted; and there is scarcely a man so far master of himself as to withstand the subtle intoxication, the sweet and penetrating poison, of woman's tender flattery and loving submission. To at certain extent it is so entirely the right thing, because it is natural and instinctive, that it is difficult to draw the line and map out exactly the division between right and wrong, pleasantness and harmfulness, and where loving submission ends and debasing slavishness begins.

Spoilt women are spoilt mainly from a like cause—over-attention from men. A few certainly are to be found, as pampered daughters, with indulgent mammas and subservient aunts given up wholly to ruining their young charge with the utmost despatch possible; but this is comparatively a rare form of the disease, and one which a little wholesome matrimonial discipline would soon cure. For it is seldom that a petted daughter becomes a spoilt wife, human affairs having that marvellous power of compensation, that inevitable tendency to readjust the balance, which prevents the continuance of a like excess under different forms.

Besides, a spoilt daughter generally makes such a supremely unpleasant wife that the husband has no inducement to continue the mistake, and therefore either lowers her tone by a judicious exhibition of snubbing, or, if she is aggressive as well as unpleasant, leaves her to fight with her shadows in the best way she can, glad for his own part to escape the strife she will not forego. One characteristic of the spoilt woman is her impatience of anything like rivalry. She never has a female friend—certainly not one of her own degree, and not one at all in the true sense of the word. Friendship presupposes equality, and a spoilt woman knows no equality. She has been so long accustomed to consider herself as the lady-paramount that she cannot understand it if any one steps in to share her honors and divide her throne.

To praise the beauty of any other woman, to find her charming, or to pay her the attention due to a charming woman, is to insult our spoilt darling, and to slight her past forgiveness. If there is only one good thing, it must be given to her—the first seat, the softest cushion, the most protected situation; and she looks for the best of all things as if naturally consecrated from her birth into the sunshine of life, and as if the "cold shade" which may do for others were by no means the portion allotted to her. It is almost impossible to make the spoilt woman understand the grace or the glory of sacrifice. By rare good fortune she may sometimes be found to possess an indestructible germ of conscience which sorrow and necessity can develop into active good; but only sometimes. The spoilt woman par excellence understands only her own value, only her own merits and the absolutism of her own requirements; and sacrifice, self-abnegation, and the whole class of virtues belonging to unselfishness are as much unknown to her as is the Decalogue in the original, or the squaring of the circle.

The spoilt woman as the wife of an unsuccessful husband or the mother of sickly children is a pitiable spectacle. If it comes to her to be obliged to sacrifice her usual luxuries, to make an old gown serve when a new one is desired, to sit up all night watching by the sick bed, to witness the painful details of illness, perhaps of death, to meet hardship face to face, and to bend her back to the burden of sorrow, she is at the first absolutely lost. Not the thing to be done, but her own discomfort in doing it, is the one master idea—not others' needs, but her own pain in supplying them, the great grief of the moment. Many are the hard lessons set us by life and fate, but the hardest of all is that given to the spoilt woman when she is made to think for others rather than for herself, and is forced by the exigencies of circumstances to sacrifice her own ease for the greater necessities of her kind.

All that large part of the perfect woman's nature which expresses itself in serving is an unknown function to the spoilt woman. She must be waited on, but she cannot in her turn serve even the one or two she loves. She is the woman who calls her husband from one end of the room to the other to put down her cup, rather than reach out her arm and put it down for herself; who, however weary he may be, will bid him get up and ring the bell, though it is close to her own hand, and her longest walk during the day has been from the dining-room to the drawing-room. It is not that she cannot do these small offices for herself, but that she likes the feeling of being waited on and attended to; and it is not for love—and the amiable if weak pleasure of attracting the notice of the beloved—it is just for the vanity of being a little somebody for the moment, and of playing off the small regality involved in the procedure. She would not return the attention.

Unlike the Eastern women, who wait on their lords, hand and foot, and who place their highest honor in their lowliest service, the spoilt woman of Western life knows nothing of the natural grace of womanly serving for love, for grace, or for gratitude. This kind of thing is peculiarly strong among the demi-monde of the higher class, and among women who are not of the demi-monde by station, but by nature. The respect they cannot command by their virtues they demand in the simulation of manner; and perhaps no women are more tenacious of the outward forms of deference than those who have lost their claim to the vital reality.

It is very striking to see the difference between the women of this type, the petites maitresses who require the utmost attention and almost servility from man, and the noble dignity of service which the pure woman can afford to give—which she finds, indeed, that it belongs to the very purity and nobleness of her womanhood to give. It is the old story of the ill-assured position which is afraid of its own weakness, and the security which can afford to descend—the rule holding good for other things besides mere social place.

Another characteristic of the spoilt woman is the changeableness and excitability of her temper. All suavity and gentleness and delightful gaiety and perfect manners when everything goes right, she startles you by her outburst of petulance when the first cross comes. If no man is a hero to his valet, neither is a spoilt woman a heroine to her maid; and the lady who has just been the charm of the drawing-room, upstairs in her boudoir makes her maid go through spiritual exercises to which walking on burning ploughshares is the only fit analogy. A length of lace unstarched, a ribbon unsewed, a flower set awry, anything that crumples only one of the myriad rose-leaves on which she lies, and the spoilt woman raves as much as if each particular leaf had become suddenly beset with thorns.

If a dove was to be transformed to a hawk the change would not be more complete, more startling, than that which occurs when the spoilt woman of well-bred company manners puts off her mask to her maid, and shows her temper over trifles. Whoever else may suffer the grievances of life, she cannot understand that she also must be at times one of the sufferers with the rest; and if by chance the bad moment comes, the person accompanying it has a hard time of it. There are spoilt women also who have their peculiar exercises in thought and opinion, and who cannot suffer that any one should think differently from themselves, or find those things sacred which to them are accursed. They will hear nothing but what is in harmony with themselves, and they take it as a personal insult when men or women attempt to reason with them, or even hold their own without flinching.

This kind is to be found specially among the more intellectual of a family or a circle; women who are pronounced "clever" by their friends, and who have been so long accustomed to think themselves clever that they have become spoilt mentally as others are personally, and fancy that minds and thoughts must follow in their direction, just as eyes and hands must follow and attend their sisters. The spoilt woman of the mental kind is a horrid nuisance generally. She is greatly given to large discourse; but discourse of a kind that leans all to one side, and that denies the right of any one to criticise, doubt, or contradict, is an intellectual Tower of Pisa under the shadow of which it is not pleasant to live.



TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

Words in italics in the original are surrounded by underscores.

The following words appear with and without hyphens. They have been left as in the original.

ball-room ballroom business-like businesslike hearth-rug hearthrug house-keeper housekeeper house-keeping housekeeping man-like manlike now-a-days nowadays over-head overhead

Variations in spelling have been left as in the original. Examples include the following:

center/centre learned/learnt spoiled/spoilt

The following corrections have been made to the text:

Page xi: INTRODUCTION, 13[original has 5]

Page 48: slink away from a bantam[original has bantum] hen

Page 67: you[original has vou] go in for this sort

Page 129: sheer force of genius[original has genuis]

Page 161: some out-of-the-way[original has out-of-the way] corner

Page 220: exhausts itself in a declaration[original has delaration] of revolt

Page 269: ignorant of contemporary[original is split across lines after con but hyphen is missing] fashions

Page 303: following the [original has the the] same extravagance

Page 332: torture it until it[original has is] has about as much life

The following words use an oe ligature in the original:

manoeuvred outmanoeuvring Oedipus Phoenician

In the phrase, "white-armed, large-limbed Here", the original has macrons over both of the vowels in "Here".

Ellipses match the original.

THE END