oul away to heaven, but that the nursery is a prison, and
babies no dearer gaolers than any other, and that household duties
disgrace the aspiring soul mounting to the empyrean. This was the
Ethereal Being of the last generation--the Blue-stocking, as a poetess
in white satin, with her eyes turned up to heaven, and her hair in
dishevelled cascades about her neck. She dropped her mantle as she
finally departed; and we still have the Della Cruscan essence, if not in
the precise form of earlier times. We still have ethereal beings who, as
the practical outcome of their etherealization, rave about music and
poetry, and Halle and Ruskin, and horribly neglect their babies and the
weekly bills.

A favorite form of feminine affectation among certain opposers of the
prevalent fast type is in an intense womanliness, an aggravating
intensity of womanliness, that makes one long for a little roughness,
just to take off the cloying excess of sweetness. This kind is generally
found with large eyes, dark in the lids and hollow in the orbit, by
which a certain spiritual expression is given to the face, a certain
look of being consumed by the hidden fire of lofty thought, that is very
effective. It does not destroy the effectiveness that the real cause of
the darkened lids and cavernous orbits, when not antimony, is most
probably internal disease; eyes of this sort stand for spirituality and
loftiness of thought and intense womanliness of nature, and, as all men
are neither chemists nor doctors, the simulation does quite as well as
truth.

The main characteristic of these women is self-consciousness. They live
before a moral mirror, and pass their time in attitudinizing to what
they think the best advantage. They can do nothing simply, nothing
spontaneously and without the fullest consciousness as to how they do
it, and how they look while they are doing it. In every action of their
lives they see themselves as pictures, as characters in a novel, as
impersonations of poetic images or thoughts. If they give you a glass of
water, or take your cup from you, they are Youth and Beauty ministering
to Strength or Age, as the case may be; if they bring you a photographic
album, they are Titian's Daughter carrying her casket, a trifle
modernized; if they hold a child in their arms, they are Madonnas, and
look unutterable maternal love, though they never saw the little
creature before, and care for it no more than for the puppy in the mews;
if t