erbred snob. Having no natural dignity, they
think to supply its place with arrogance. They mistake noisy bounce for
self-possession, and supercilious rudeness as the sign of superiority.
They encourage themselves in sleepy stupidity under the impression that
they are acquiring aristocratic "repose." They would appear to have
studied "attitude" from the pages of the _London Journal_, coquetry from
barmaids--the commoner class of barmaids, I mean--wit from three-act
farces, and manners from the servants'-hall. To be gushingly fawning to
those above them, and vulgarly insolent to everyone they consider below
them, is their idea of the way to hold and improve their position,
whatever it may be, in society; and to be brutally indifferent to the
rights and feelings of everybody else in the world is, in their opinion,
the hall-mark of gentle birth.

They are the women you see at private views, pushing themselves in front
of everybody else, standing before the picture so that no one can get
near it, and shouting out their silly opinions, which they evidently
imagine to be brilliantly satirical remarks, in strident tones: the women
who, in the stalls of the theatre, talk loudly all through the
performance; and who, having arrived in the middle of the first act, and
made as much disturbance as they know how, before settling down in their
seats, ostentatiously get up and walk out before the piece is finished:
the women who, at dinner-party and "At Home"--that cheapest and most
deadly uninteresting of all deadly uninteresting social functions--(You
know the receipt for a fashionable "At Home," don't you? Take five
hundred people, two-thirds of whom do not know each other, and the other
third of whom cordially dislike each other, pack them, on a hot day, into
a room capable of accommodating forty, leave them there to bore one
another to death for a couple of hours with drawing-room philosophy and
second-hand scandal; then give them a cup of weak tea, and a piece of
crumbly cake, without any plate to eat it on; or, if it is an evening
affair, a glass of champagne of the
you-don't-forget-you've-had-it-for-a-week brand, and a ham-sandwich, and
put them out into the street again)--can do nothing but make spiteful
remarks about everybody whose name and address they happen to know: the
women who, in the penny 'bus (for, in her own country, the lady of the
new school is wonderfully economical and business-like), spreads herself
out o