Sir W. V. Harcourt, on the night when he was so huffy, "left the House." True: he certainly did not "carry the House with him."
MODERN TYPES.
(By Mr. Punch's Own Type-Writer.)
No. IV.—THE GIDDY SOCIETY LADY.
The Giddy Lady is one who, having been plunged at an early age into smart society, is whirled perpetually round in a vortex of pleasures and excitements. In the effort to keep her head above water, she is as likely as not to lose it. This condition she naturally describes as "being in the swim." In the unceasing struggle to maintain herself there, she may perhaps shorten her life, but she will apparently find a compensation in the increased length of her dressmaker's bills. She is ordinarily the daughter of aristocratic parents, who carefully allowed her to run wild from the moment she could run at all. By their example she has been taught to hold as articles of her very limited faith, that the serious concerns of life are of interest only to fools, and should, therefore (though the inference is not obvious), be entirely neglected by herself, and that frivolity and fashion are the twin deities before whom every self-respecting woman must bow down.
Having left the Seminary at which she acquired an elementary ignorance of spelling, a 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 célèbres are to her a staple of conversation, her interest in them varying directly as the number of co-respondents.
It is impossible, therefore, that the men who are her friends should treat her with that chivalrous respect which an obsolete tradition would seem to require, but they suffer no loss of her esteem in consequence. Such being her behaviour in the society of men, the tone of her daily conversation with friends of her own sex may be readily imagined, though it might not be pleasant to describe. Suffice it to say, that she sees no shame in addressing them, or in allowing herself to be addressed by a name which a Court of law has held to be libellous when applied to a burlesque actress. She is always at Hurlingham or the Ranelagh, and has seen pigeons killed without a qualm. She never misses a Sandown or a Kempton meeting; she dazzles the eyes of the throng at Ascot every year, and never fails at Goodwood.