t
Cecil's winnings for him with a rapidity that threatened to leave very
few of them for the London season. She was very pretty, sweetly pretty;
with hair that wanted no gold powder, the clearest, sauciest eyes, and
the handsomest mouth in the world; but of grammar she had not a notion,
of her aspirates she had never a recollection, of conversation she had
not an idea; of slang she had, to be sure, a repertoire, but to this was
her command of language limited. She dressed perfectly, but she was a
vulgar little soul; drank everything, from Bass' ale to rum-punch, and
from cherry-brandy to absinthe; thought it the height of wit to stifle
you with cayenne slid into your vanilla ice, and the climax of repartee
to cram your hat full of peach stones and lobster shells; was thoroughly
avaricious, thoroughly insatiate, thoroughly heartless, pillaged with
both hands, and then never had enough; had a coarse good nature when
it cost her nothing, and was "as jolly as a grig," according to her
phraseology, so long as she could stew her pigeons in champagne, drink
wines and liqueurs that were beyond price, take the most dashing trap
in the Park up to Flirtation Corner, and laugh and sing and eat Richmond
dinners, and show herself at the Opera with Bertie or some other "swell"
attached to her, in the very box next to a Duchess.

The Zu-Zu was perfectly happy; and as for the pathetic pictures that
novelists and moralists draw, of vice sighing amid turtle and truffles
for childish innocence in the cottage at home where honeysuckles
blossomed and brown brooks made melody, and passionately grieving on
the purple cushions of a barouche for the time of straw pallets and
untroubled sleep, why--the Zu-Zu would have vaulted herself on the
box-seat of a drag, and told you "to stow all that trash"; her childish
recollections were of a stifling lean-to with the odor of pigsty and
straw-yard, pork for a feast once a week, starvation all the other six
days, kicks, slaps, wrangling, and a general atmosphere of beer and
wash-tubs; she hated her past, and loved her cigar on the drag. The
Zu-Zu is fact; the moralists' pictures are moonshine.

The Zu-Zu is an openly acknowledged fact, moreover, daily becoming more
prominent in the world, more brilliant, more frankly recognized, and
more omnipotent. Whether this will ultimately prove for the better or
the worse, it would be a bold man who should dare say; there is at least
one thing left to desire in it