ll sorts of
astonishing innovations had taken place. Many races had come to England,
or rather to London, which is in England but not of it; had made money,
had bred their sons at the great public schools and universities and
their daughters at convents in France and Belgium. These dark-haired,
gray-eyed, stylish, highly strung, athletic, talented girls are
phenomena of the Stockbroking Age. They do things Lady Rowena and Lady
Clara Vere de Vere would not tolerate for a moment. Outwardly resembling
the wealthy Society Girl, they are essentially quite different. Some
marry artists and have emotional outbreaks. Some combine a very genuine
romantic temperament with a disheartening sophistication about incomes
and running a home. They not only wish to marry so that they can begin
where their parents leave off, but they know how to do it. They can
engage a competent house-maid and rave about Kubelik on the same
afternoon, and do both in an experienced sort of way. They go everywhere
by themselves, and to men whom they dislike they are sheathed in shining
armour. They can dance, swim, motor, golf, entertain, earn their own
living, talk music, art, books, and china, wash a dog and doctor him.
And they can do all this, mark, without having any real experience of
what we call life. They are good girls, nice girls, virtuous girls, and
very marriageable girls, too, but they have a superficial hardness of
texture on their character which closely resembles the mask of
experience. They are like the baggage which used to be sold in certain
obscure shops in London with the labels of foreign hotels already pasted
on it. It follows that sometimes this girl of the upper-middle,
comfortably fixed class makes a mistake in her choice. Or rather, she
credits with heroic attributes a being of indifferent calibre. She
realizes in him some profound but erratic emotion, and the world in
which she moves beholds her behaviour and listens to her praise of her
beloved with annoyance. They speak, not of a mistake of course, but of
the strangeness of girls nowadays, and incompatibility of temperaments.
But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of these affairs is the blindness
of the girl's friends to her frequent superiority over the being whom
she adores. She isn't good enough for him, they say. The fact is, at the
time of this story, fine women were cheap in England, and gentlemen of
indifferent calibre were picking up bargains every day.

Mr. Reginald