merges from obscurity, or, worse perhaps, from the
notoriety of commercial antecedents, and carried, by a vigorous push,
the outworks of fashionable society. The wife of a successful speculator
in cotton or guano, who is also the mistress of a comfortable mansion in
Bloomsbury, gradually becomes restless and dissatisfied with her
surroundings. It would be curious to trace the growth of this
discontent. Ambition is deeply rooted in the female bosom. Even
housemaids are actuated by an impulse to better themselves, and village
school-mistresses yearn for a larger sphere. Perhaps it is this instinct
to rise, so creditable to the sex, which compels a lady with a long
purse, and a name well known in the city, to enter the lists as an
aspirant to fashion. Perhaps her career is developed by a more gradual
process. Climbing social Alps is like climbing material Alps--for a time
the intervening heights shut out from view the grander peaks. It is not
till one has topped Peckham or Hackney that a more extended horizon
bursts on the eye, and one catches sight of the glittering summits of
Belgravia. Account for it as we may, the phenomenon of a woman in the
enjoyment of every comfort and luxury that wealth can give, but ready
to barter it all for a few crumbs of contemptuous notice from persons of
rank, is by no means uncommon. Probably the fashionable newspaper is a
great stimulus to pushing.

The rich vulgarian pores over _Court Circulars_ and catalogues of
aristocratic names till the fascination becomes irresistible, and the
desire to see her own name, purged of cotton or guano, figuring in the
same sheet grows to a monomania. But how is this to be done? Fortunately
for the purpose which she has in view, there exist in these latter days
amphibious beings, half trader, half fop, with one set of relations with
the world of commerce and another set of relations with the world of
fashion. The dandy, driven into the city by the stress of his fiscal
exigencies, forms a link between the East-end and the West. Among his
other functions is that of giving aid and counsel, not exactly gratis,
to any fair outsider who wants to "get into" society. For every
applicant he has but one bit of advice. She must spend money.

For a woman who is neither clever nor beautiful nor high-born, there is
but one way to proceed. She must bribe right and left. No rotten borough
absorbs more cash than the fashionable world. Its recognition is merely
a question