dlar's pack with all its little trinkets and tawdrinesses
spread out for the buyer. Ah, you don't know your sister. To me she is a
dear transparent soul with her whole purport printed on the surface like
a sandwich board. She thinks the woman world is ranged in three
tiers--the top story for eighteen-year-olds. Everything there must be
out on approval. It's no good ticketing yourself 'Not for sale,' nor
even pricing yourself at a prohibitive figure--no good whatever. She
brings round her customers, provides them with her own lorgnon in the
form of opinion, and pads them with conversational treatises on the
subject in hand, like a Cook's guide to a party of tourists.

"'She has more refinement than that,' I can hear you say.

"Refinement, yes. Flowers do not grow with their roots uppermost, but we
know they have roots all the same. Her social smile is a very guileless
plant, but I detect how far its ramifications extend.

"Her second shelf is scarcely better, it is for the mothers, mild
brooding creatures whose brains perform kaleidoscopic revolutions with
the same _materia_--dinner _menus_, infant food, servants' industries,
and wardrobe renovations. 'The idea,' she would say, 'of a woman earning
her share of the family income, contributing three hundred or so to the
housekeeping instead of saving! It is unconventional, and, consequently,
bad form.'

"And the last shelf is for the matrons, dowagers,
chaperones--middlewomen of the matrimonial market like her dear
misguided self--social seals of respectability stamped with the impress
of a Buckingham Palace curtsy; godmothers for the distribution of
hall-marked silver and hall-marked morality, dragons----. But I forget
your friend, the poet. Of course he thought I was 'trotted out;' of
course I hated him for thinking it. I pretended never to have heard of
him or read his works. Literature was practically barred, for I
confessed I loathed poets. He agreed, quoted Coventry Patmore, who says
a poet is one degree removed from a saint--or Balaam's ass. Well, men
saints are chilly, and donkeys are troublesome, and kick. I told him so.
Yet I abhor compromises! I can't say what I do care for; certainly not
being thrown at men's heads like stale eggs at election time!

"And what do you think we talked of?

"Not the modern girl, you may be sure. Mr Lorraine is romantic, and
thinks that intelligent women are bound to be ill-shod, splay-waisted,
and brusque. I had half a mind t