womanliness, by the sacrifice of modesty, by
flattering her wooer's base preferences before marriage, by encouraging
his baser selfishness afterwards, by hunting her husband to the club and
restricting her maternal energies to a couple of infants, woman has at
last bought her freedom. She is no slave to a husband as her mother was,
she is not buried beneath the cares of a family like her grandmother.
She has changed all that, and the old world of home and domestic
tenderness and parental self-sacrifice lies in ruins at her feet. She
has her liberty; what will she do with it? As yet, freedom means simply
more slang, more jewelry, more selfish extravagance, less modesty. As we
meet her on the stairs, as we see the profuse display of her charms, as
we listen to the flippant, vapid chatter, we turn a little sickened from
woman stripped of all that is womanly, and cry to Heaven, as Madame de
Campan cried to the Emperor--"Give us good mothers."

UNEQUAL MARRIAGES.

Acute ladies who concern themselves much with the superficial social
currents of the time are beginning to perceive, or at least to think
that they perceive, a fatal and growing tendency to _mesalliances_ on
the part of men who ought to know better. They complain not merely of
the doting old gentleman who has been a bachelor long enough to lose his
wits, and so marries his cook or his housemaid, nor of the debauched
young simpleton who takes a wife from a casino or the bar of a
night-_cafe_. Actions of this sort are as common at one time as at
another. Old fools and young fools maintain a pretty steady average.
Their silly exploits are the issue, not of the tendencies of the age,
but of their own individual and particular lack of wits. They do not
affect the general direction of social feeling, nor have we any right to
argue up from their preposterous connexions to the influences and
conditions of the society of which they are only the abnormal and
irregular growths. What people mean, when they talk of an increase in
the number of men who marry beneath them, is that men otherwise sensible
and respectable and sober-minded perpetrate the irregularity in
something like cold blood, and with a measure of deliberation. Whether
observers who have formed this opinion are right, or are only
anticipating their own apprehensions and alarms, is difficult to
ascertain. A good deal depends on the accidental range of the observer's
own acquaintances, and still more on t