ir: a few of them there might be, imitators of
the slang invented by schoolboys and circulated through the medium of
small novelists; they might use such expressions as "stunning," "cheek,"
"awfully jolly," etc. But now I find a great many who have advanced to
a slang beyond that of verbal expressions,--a slang of mind, a slang
of sentiment, a slang in which very little seems left of the woman and
nothing at all of the lady.

Newspaper essayists assert that the young men of the day are to blame
for this; that the young men like it; and the fair husband-anglers dress
their flies in the colours most likely to attract a nibble. Whether this
excuse be the true one I cannot pretend to judge; but it strikes me that
the men about my own age who affect to be fast are a more languid race
than the men from ten to twenty years older, whom they regard as _slow_.
The habit of dram-drinking in the morning is a very new idea, an idea
greatly in fashion at the moment. Adonis calls for a "pick-me-up" before
he has strength enough to answer a _billet-doux_ from Venus. Adonis
has not the strength to get nobly drunk, but his delicate constitution
requires stimulants, and he is always tippling.

The men of high birth or renown for social success belonging, my
dear father, to your time, are still distinguished by an air of good
breeding, by a style of conversation more or less polished and not
without evidences of literary culture, from men of the same rank in
my generation, who appear to pride themselves on respecting nobody and
knowing nothing, not even grammar. Still we are assured that the world
goes on steadily improving. _That_ new idea is in full vigour.

Society in the concrete has become wonderfully conceited as to its
own progressive excellences, and the individuals who form the concrete
entertain the same complacent opinion of themselves. There are, of
course, even in my brief and imperfect experience, many exceptions to
what appear to me the prevalent characteristics of the rising generation
in "society." Of these exceptions I must content myself with naming the
most remarkable. _Place aux dames_, the first I name is Cecilia Travers.
She and her father are now in town, and I meet them frequently. I
can conceive no civilized era in the world which a woman like Cecilia
Travers would not grace and adorn, because she is essentially the type
of woman as man likes to imagine woman; namely, on the fairest side of
the womanly character