en the sweet English chatelaine
at her roulette wheel, and ere long it may be that tender parents will
be writing to complain of the compulsory baccarat in our public schools.

In fact, we are all gamblers once more, but our gambling is on a finer
scale than ever it was. We fly from the card-room to the heath, and
from the heath to the City, and from the City to the coast of the
Mediterranean. And just as no one seriously encourages the clergy in its
frantic efforts to lay the spirit of chance that has thus resurged among
us, so no longer are many faces set against that other great sign of a
more complicated life, the love for cosmetics. No longer is a lady of
fashion blamed if, to escape the outrageous persecution of time, she
fly for sanctuary to the toilet-table; and if a damosel, prying in her
mirror, be sure that with brush and pigment she can trick herself into
more charm, we are not angry. Indeed, why should we ever have been?
Surely it is laudable, this wish to make fair the ugly and overtop
fairness, and no wonder that within the last five years the trade of the
makers of cosmetics has increased immoderately--twentyfold, so one of
these makers has said to me. We need but walk down any modish street
and peer into the little broughams that flit past, or (in Thackeray's
phrase) under the bonnet of any woman we meet, to see over how wide a
kingdom rouge reigns.

And now that the use of pigments is becoming general, and most women
are not so young as they are painted, it may be asked curiously how the
prejudice ever came into being. Indeed, it is hard to trace folly, for
that it is inconsequent, to its start; and perhaps it savours too
much of reason to suggest that the prejudice was due to the tristful
confusion man has made of soul and surface. Through trusting so keenly
to the detection of the one by keeping watch upon the other, and by
force of the thousand errors following, he has come to think of surface
even as the reverse of soul. He seems to suppose that every clown
beneath his paint and lip-salve is moribund and knows it (though in
verity, I am told, clowns are as cheerful a class of men as any other),
that the fairer the fruit's rind and the more delectable its bloom,
the closer are packed the ashes within it. The very jargon of the
hunting-field connects cunning with a mask. And so perhaps came man's
anger at the embellishment of women--that lovely mask of enamel with its
shadows of pink and tiny pencil