known never to wear her gowns and hats
more than half a dozen times.

What is that new supreme desire to pass for a lady?

'It proceeds purely,' said Lady Violet Greville, 'from a wish to
imitate; it is vulgarity pure and simple.

'It is the aspiration after gentility, the longing to appear what we
are not, the desire of the fly for the dinner-lamp.

'It is the natural consequence of the religion of the Anglo-Saxon
race--make-believe.

'A real lady's existence,' continues her ladyship, 'seems to outsiders
to be all sweetness, and passed in a land of milk and honey; whereas,
in reality, could her poor, crawling admirers realize it, the modern
lady's life is a compound of hard work, exhausting excitement, anxious
ease, and infinite disillusion. To begin with, she is often poorer than
her prosperous neighbour, compelled to practise petty and galling
economies, travel second class, wear cleaned gloves, and spend
unpleasant moments in street-cars and omnibuses. It is the vulgar
_nouveaux riches_ who own the carriages, the horses, the jewels, and
the money.'

Yet the vulgar rich may be as lavish as they please, may throw gold out
of the windows, give a small fortune for their horses and carriages,
they have not enough money to buy what that lady possesses, her
delicacy and refinement. Even their servants know that, for they can
take the measure of the mushroom nobility to a T.

In a few years more, no doubt, the word 'lady,' entirely divested of
the original meaning, far away buried in the mists of time, will merely
be the equivalent of the feminine gender, the female of the male, and
then the gentler bred and wiser of the sex will exult in bravely
calling themselves women. And they will be right. 'A perfect woman'
sounds to my ears far more sweetly than 'a perfect lady.' There is no
misunderstanding about the former. 'I am not an angel,' says an
_ingenue_ to her _fiance_ in some French play, the name of which now
escapes me; 'don't expect too much from me. I am only a woman.' A
woman--only a woman. Heavens! that is good enough for anybody!

Lady Violet Greville concludes her clever article by a beautiful
definition of a lady:

'The real lady settles her debts, does not forget her liabilities,
would as soon cheat as commit murder, and actually considers an
engagement a binding duty. She has a soft voice and a pleasant manner;
she is the daughter of evolution and the survival of the fittest. If
she has nerves, she