with few ideas,
fewer duties--but with plenty of leisure--plenty of health--plenty of
money in their pockets--plenty of debts to their tradesmen--daring at
Melton--scheming at T'attersall's--pride to maiden aunts--plague to
thrifty fathers--fickle lovers, but solid matches--in brief, fast
livers, who get through their youth betimes, and who, for the most part,
are middle-aged before they are thirty--tamed by wedlock--sobered by the
responsibilities that come with the cares of property and the dignities
of rank--undergo abrupt metamorphosis into chairmen of quarter sessions,
county members, or decorous peers;--their ideas enriched as their duties
grow--their opinions, once loose as willows to the wind, stiffening into
the palisades of fenced propriety--valuable, busy men, changed as Henry
V., when coming into the cares of state, he said to the Chief Justice,
"There is my hand;" and to Sir John Falstaff,

"I know thee not, old roan;
Fall to thy prayers!"

But meanwhile the elite of this _jeunesse doree_ glittered round Flora
Vyvyan: not a regular beauty like Lady Adela--not a fine girl like
Miss Vipont, but such a light, faultless figure--such a pretty radiant
face--more womanly for affection to be manlike--Hebe aping Thalestris.
Flora, too, was an heiress--an only child--spoilt, wilful--not at all
accomplished--(my belief is that accomplishments are thought great bores
by the jeunesse doree)--no accomplishment except horsemanship, with a
slight knack at billiards, and the capacity to take three whiffs from a
Spanish cigarette. That last was adorable--four offers had been advanced
to her hand on that merit alone.--(N.B. Young ladies do themselves no
good with the jeunesse doree, which, in our time, is a lover that
rather smokes than "sighs, like furnace," by advertising their horror
of cigars.) You would suppose that Flora Vyvyan must be coarse-vulgar
perhaps; not at all; she was pignaute--original; and did the oddest
things with the air and look of the highest breeding. Fairies cannot
be vulgar, no matter what they do; they may take the strangest
liberties--pinch the maids--turn the house topsy-turvy; but they are
ever the darlings of grace and poetry. Flora Vyvyan was a fairy. Not
peculiarly intellectual herself, she had a veneration for intellect;
those fast young men were the last persons likely to fascinate that fast
young lady. Women are so perverse; they always prefer the very people
you would