, in the present fashion of life among
women, is how it holds its ground in spite of the disapprobation of men.
It used to be an old-time notion that the sexes were made for each
other, and that it was only natural for them to please each other, and
to set themselves out for that end. But the girl of the period does not
please men. She pleases them as little as she elevates them; and how
little she does that, the class of women she has taken as her models of
itself testifies.

All men whose opinion is worth having prefer the simple and genuine girl
of the past, with her tender little ways and pretty bashful modesties,
to this loud and rampant modernization, with her false red hair and
painted skin, talking slang as glibly as a man, and by preference
leading the conversation to doubtful subjects. She thinks she is piquant
and exciting when she thus makes herself the bad copy of a worse
original; and she will not see that though men laugh with her they do
not respect her, though they flirt with her they do not marry her; she
will not believe that she is not the kind of thing they want, and that
she is acting against nature and her own interests when she disregards
their advice and offends their taste. We do not see how she makes out
her account, viewing her life from any side; but all we can do is to
wait patiently until the national madness has passed, and our women have
come back again to the old English ideal, once the most beautiful, the
most modest, the most essentially womanly in the world.

FOOLISH VIRGINS.

The heroines of the London season--the fillies, we mean, who have been
entered for the great matrimonial stakes, and have been mentioned in the
betting--have by this time exchanged the fast pleasures of the town for
the vapid pastimes of the country. We do not of course concern ourselves
with those poor simple girls who only repeat the lives and morals of
old-fashioned English homes, and who are too respectable and too modest
to be pointed at as the girls of the season. We speak of the fast
sisterhood only. After three months of egregious dissipation they enter
duly upon the next stage of their regular yearly alternations. Three
months of headlong folly are succeeded by three months of deadly
_ennui_. Action and reaction are always equal. The pains and weariness
of moral crapulousness arise in nice proportion to the passion of the
debauch. It is a dismal hour when we look on the withered leaves of las