From the parades of fashionable youth?
Have maiden tenderness and manly truth
From Vanity Fair quite vanished?"
"Soft!" sneered the Shadow. "Questionings like these
Sound gauche and gushing. Better far to freeze
To the right social zero,
Than stoop to zeal and frank display of zest,
Notes of the vulgar glories that invest
The housemaid-novel's hero.
"Nothing more useful than the surface-ice