eems to me its next of kin; still we may not call
the woman who assails the soap boxes--even those that antic about the
White House gates--by the opprobrious terms of adventuress. Where such a
one is not a lunatic she is a nuisance. There are women and women.

We may leave out of account the shady ladies of history. Neither Aspasia
nor Lucrezia Borgia nor the Marquise de Brinvilliers could with accuracy
be called an adventuress. The term is of later date. Its origin and
growth have arisen out of the complexities of modern society.

In fiction Milady and Madame Marneffe come in for first honors--in
each the leopard crossed on the serpent and united under a petticoat,
beautiful and wicked--but since the Balzac and Dumas days the
story-tellers and stage-mongers have made exceeding free with the
type, and we have between Herman Merivale's Stephanie de Mohrivart
and Victorien Sardou's Zica a very theater--or shall we say a charnel
house--of the woman with the past; usually portrayed as the victim of
circumstance; unprincipled through cruel experience; insensible through
lack of conscience; sexless in soul, but a siren in seductive arts; cold
as ice; hard as iron; implacable as the grave, pursuing her ends with
force of will, intellectual audacity and elegance of manner, yet,
beneath this brilliant depravity, capable of self-pity, yielding anon
in moments of depression to a sudden gleam of human tenderness and a
certain regret for the innocence she has lost.

Such a one is sometimes, though seldom, met in real life. But many
pretenders may be encountered at Monte Carlo and other European resorts.
They range from the Parisian cocotte, signalized by her chic apparel,
to the fashionable divorcee who in trying her luck at the tables keeps
a sharp lookout for the elderly gent with the wad, often fooled by the
enterprising sport who has been there before.

These are out and out professional adventuresses. There are other
adventuresses, however, than those of the story and the stage, the
casino and the cabaret. The woman with the past becomes the girl with
the future.

Curiously enough this latter is mainly, almost exclusively, recruited
from our countrywomen, who to an abnormal passion for foreign titles
join surpassing ignorance of foreign society. Thus she is ready to
the hand of the Continental fortune seeker masquerading as a
nobleman--occasionally but not often the black sheep of some noble
family--carrying not a bona fid