he woman whom all men respect, whom all women envy,
and wonder how she does it, and whom all the young adore, and wish they
had for an elder sister or an aunt. And the secret of it all lies in
truth, in love, in purity, and in unselfishness.

Standing far in front of this sweet and wholesome idealization is _la
femme passee_ of to-day--the reality as we meet with it at balls and
fetes and afternoon at homes, ever foremost in the mad chase after
pleasure, for which alone she seems to think she has been sent into the
world. Dressed in the extreme of youthful fashion, her thinning hair
dyed and crimped and fired till it is more like red-brown tow than hair,
her flaccid cheeks ruddled, her throat whitened, her bust displayed with
unflinching generosity, as if beauty was to be measured by cubic inches,
her lustreless eyes blackened round the lids, to give the semblance of
limpidity to the tarnished whites--perhaps the pupil dilated by
belladonna, or perhaps a false and fatal brilliancy for the moment given
by opium, or by eau de cologne, of which she has a store in her
carriage, and drinks as she passes from ball to ball; no kindly drapery
of lace or gauze to conceal the breadth of her robust maturity, or to
soften the dreadful shadows of her leanness--there she stands, the
wretched creature who will not consent to grow old, and who will still
affect to be like a fresh coquettish girl when she is nothing but _la
femme passee, la femme passee et ridicule_ into the bargain.

There is not a folly for which even the thoughtlessness of youth is but
a poor excuse into which she, in all the plenitude of her abundant
experience, does not plunge. Wife and mother as she may be, she flirts
and makes love as if an honorable issue was as open to her as to her
daughter, or as if she did not know to what end flirting and making love
lead in all ages. If we watch the career of such a woman, we see how, by
slow but very sure degrees, she is obliged to lower the standard of her
adorers, and to take up at last with men of inferior social position,
who are content to buy her patronage by their devotion. To the best men
of her own class she can give nothing that they value; so she barters
with snobs, who go into the transaction with their eyes open, and take
the whole affair as a matter of exchange, and _quid pro quo_ rigidly
exacted. Or she does really dazzle some very young and low born man who
is weak as well as ambitious, and who thinks the