Sandown and Kempton, Ascot and
Goodwood, Hurlingham, and the Ranelagh, supply her with a variety
of knowledge infinitely more interesting and "actual" than the dry
details of population, area, climate, and capital towns, which may be
learnt (by others) from primers of geography.

Although it is, from their and her point of view, eminently desirable
that the parents of the Hurlingham Girl should be rich, yet it is by
no means absolutely necessary. It is, however, essential that they
should possess a social position which will ensure to them and to
their daughter an easy entrance into that world which considers
itself, not perhaps better, but certainly good. Her mother has
probably discovered long since that the task of being thwarted by
her daughter is an intolerable addition to her social burdens. She
therefore permits her, with as much resignation as she can command, to
take her own course in all those matters that do not conflict directly
with the maternal plans, and she may even come to take a pride in the
bold and dashing independence by which her daughter seeks to relieve
her of all responsibility, if not of all anxiety.

It is naturally during the London Season that the life of the
Hurlingham Girl is at its fullest and best. On week-day mornings she
is a frequent attendant in the Row, the means of her father being
apparently sufficient to provide her with a sleek and showy Park
hack and an irreproachable groom. Thence she hastens home to rest
and dawdle until the hour arrives for luncheon, to which meal she has
invited the youth who happens to be temporarily dancing attendance
upon her, for it is understood in many houses that luncheon is an open
meal for which no formal invitation from a parent is necessary. In the
afternoon there is always a bazaar, an amateur concert, an exhibition,
a fashionable _matinee_ or a Society tea-party to be visited. For the
evening there are dinners, and theatres, and an endless succession of
dances, at which the flowers, the suppers, and the general decorations
possess as much or as little variety as the conversation of those who
overcrowd the rooms to an accompaniment of dance-music that may once
have been new.

[Illustration]

But of course there are distractions. Now and again Society seeks
relief from its load of care by emigrating _en masse_ for the day to
a race-meeting at Sandown or Kempton. There the Hurlingham Girl is
as much at home as though she were native to the s