long as they don't clash with her amusements. Indeed, you will generally
find that her dear friend is a young lady of great simplicity and
irreproachable principles, whom she admits just enough, but not too far,
into her confidence, and who finds it worth while to enact the part, now
of a blind, and now of a foil.

If any one asserts that this treatment of the human pigeon is cruel, we
can only reply, with a correspondent of the _Times_ who writes to rebuke
the humanitarians who would rob a poor boa of his squealing rabbit--away
with such cant! Is a married woman to be stinted of her "small
pleasures" because prudes affect to think the means by which they are
obtained unfeminine? As well might they think it unfeline in pussy to
play with her mouse.

The walking pigeon is as much intended for the prey of a stronger
species as the pigeon that flies. The plucking which he receives at the
hands of his fair manipulator is nothing to what he would get at the
hands of his own sex, in the army, on the turf, or in the city. If the
pigeon has reason to think himself lucky in faring no worse, the
non-pigeon section of society has no less reason to be grateful for a
new illustration of female character. Not that the mercenary development
in some of our young matrons is altogether new. It is only an old
domestic virtue, carried to an extreme--thrift, running into an engaging
rapacity.

AMBITIOUS WIVES.

The recent death of Mrs. Proudie, who was so well known and so little
loved by the readers of Mr. Trollope's novels, is one of those occasions
which ought not to be allowed to pass away without being improved. To
many men it will suggest many things. She was a type. As a type ought to
be, she was perfect and full-blown. But her characteristics enter into
other women in varying degrees, and with all sorts of minor colors. The
Proudie element in wives and women is one of those unrecognised yet
potent conditions of life which master us all, and yet are admitted and
taken into calculation and account by none. It is in the nature of
things that such an element should exist, and should be powerful in this
peculiar and oblique way. We deny women the direct exercise of their
capacities, and the immediate gratification of an overt ambition. The
natural result is that they run to artifice, and that a good-natured
husband is made the conductor between an ambitious wife and the outer
world where the prizes of ambition are scrambled