se, his carriage, his balance at
the banker's, his title; and he himself is just the inevitable condition
clogging the wheels of her fortune; at best an adjunct, to be tolerated
with more or less patience as may chance. For it is only the
old-fashioned sort, not girls of the period _pur sang_, that marry for
love, or put the husband before the banker.

But she does not marry easily. Men are afraid of her; and with reason.
They may amuse themselves with her for an evening, but they do not take
her readily for life. Besides, after all her efforts, she is only a
poor copy of the real thing; and the real thing is far more amusing than
the copy, because it is real. Men can get that whenever they like; and
when they go into their mother's drawing-rooms, to see their sisters and
their sisters' friends, they want something of quite different flavor.
_Toujours perdrix_ is bad providing all the world over; but a continual
weak imitation of _toujours perdrix_ is worse. If we must have only one
kind of thing, let us have it genuine; and the queens of St. John's Wood
in their unblushing honesty, rather than their imitators and
make-believes in Bayswater and Belgravia. For, at whatever cost of
shocked self-love or pained modesty it may be, it cannot be too plainly
told to the modern English girl that the net result of her present
manner of life is to assimilate her as nearly as possible to a class of
women whom we must not call by their proper--or improper--name. And we
are willing to believe that she has still some modesty of soul left
hidden under all this effrontery of fashion, and that, if she could be
made to see herself as she appears to the eyes of men, she would mend
her ways before too late.

It is terribly significant of the present state of things when men are
free to write as they do of the women of their own nation. Every word of
censure flung against them is two-edged, and wounds those who condemn as
much as those who are condemned; for surely it need hardly be said that
men hold nothing so dear as the honor of their women, and that no one
living would willingly lower the repute of his mother or his sisters. It
is only when these have placed themselves beyond the pale of masculine
respect that such things could be written as are written now; when they
become again what they were once they will gather round them the love
and homage and chivalrous devotion which were then an Englishwoman's
natural inheritance. The marvel