smattering of French phrases as used by English lady
novelists, and a taste for music which leads her in after-life to prefer
Miss BESSIE BELLWOOD to BEETHOVEN, she is soon afterwards brought out at
a smart dance in London. From this point her progress is rapid. Balls
and concerts, luncheons and receptions, dinners and theatres, race
meetings and cricket matches, at both of which more attention is paid to
fashion than to the field, follow one another in a dizzy succession. She
has naturally no time for thought, but in order to avoid the least
suspicion of it, she learns to chatter the slang of the youthful
Guardsmen and others who are her companions. A certain flashing style of
beauty ensures to her the devotion of numerous admirers, to whom she
babbles of "chappies" and "Johnnies," and "real jam" and "stony broke,"
and "two to one bar one," as if her life depended upon the correct
pronunciation of as many of these phrases as possible in the shortest
time on record. She thus comes to be considered a cheerful companion,
and at the end of her third season, marries a jaded man of pleasure,
whose wealth is more considerable than his personal attractions, and
who, for some inscrutable reason, has been approved by her parents as a
suitable husband.

She treats matrimony as an emancipation from rules which she has rarely
seen any one else observe, and has never honoured herself, and after a
few years, she becomes one of that gaudy band of Society ladies who
follow with respectful imitation the giddy vagaries of the Corinthians
of a lower grade. She dines often without her husband at smart
restaurants, where she has constant opportunities of studying the
manners of her models. She adores the burlesques at the Gaiety and the
Avenue, and talks, with a complete absence of reserve and a disregard of
pedantic accuracy, about the lives and adventures of the actresses who
figure there. She can tell you, and does, who presented LOTTIE A. with a
diamond star, and who was present at the last supper-party in honour of
TOTTIE B. Nor is she averse to being seen and talked about in a box at a
Music-Hall, or at one of the pleasure-palaces in Leicester Square. She
allows the young men who cluster round her to suppose that she knows all
about their lapses from strict propriety, and that she commends rather
than condemns them. _Causes celebres_ are to her a staple of
conversation, her interest in them varying directly as the number of
co-respon