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
gr