Twice a year the Giddy Lady is compelled by the traditions of her caste to visit Paris, in order to replenish her exhausted wardrobe. On these occasions she patronises only the best hotel, and the most expensive and celebrated of men-dressmakers, and she is "fitted" by a son of the house, of whom she talks constantly and familiarly by his Christian name as Jean, or Pierre, or Philippe. During the shooting season she goes from country-house to country-house. She has been seen sometimes with a gun in her hands, often with a lighted cigarette between her lips. Indeed she is too frequent a visitor at shooting-luncheons and in smoking-rooms, where a woman, however much she may attempt to disguise her sex, is never cordially welcomed by men. The conventions of the society in which she moves seem to require that she should be attended during her visits by a cavaliere servente, who is therefore always invited with her. Their pastime is to imitate a flirtation, and to burlesque love, but neither of them is ever deceived into attributing the least reality to this occupation, which is often as harmless as it is always absurd.
These and similar occupations, of course, leave her no time to attend to her children, who are left to grow up as best they may under the fostering care of nursery-maids and of such relations as may choose, from time to time, to burden themselves with the olive-branches of others. Her husband has long since retired from all competition with her, and leaves her free to follow her own devices, whilst he himself follows the odds. She is often supposed to be riding for a fall. It is certain that her pace is fast. Yet, though many whisper, it is quite possible that she will ride to the end without open damage.
Of her dress and her jewels it need only be said that she affects tailor-made costumes and cat's-eye bangles by day, and that at night she escapes by the skin of her teeth from that censure which the scantiness of her coverings would seem to warrant, and which Mr. Horsley, R.A., if he saw her, would be certain to pronounce.
In middle age she loses her brilliant complexion. Yet, for reasons best known to herself, her colour continues to be bright, though her spirits and her temper seem to suffer in the effort to keep it so. As old age advances, she is as likely as not to become a gorgon of immaculate propriety, and will be heard lamenting over the laxity of manners which permits girls to do what was never dreamt of when she was a girl herself.
THE PINT OF IT.
How curious that our youngest boy, aged fifteen months, should have already become partially paralysed, and be afflicted, besides, with anæmia, rickets, and growing inability to digest the smallest particle of food!
If it were not that we procure our milk from the "Hygienic Unskimmed Lacteal Fluid and Food for Babes Company, Limited," I should begin to believe that there might be something wrong with the beverage which forms the staple of his infantile dietary.
The Company professes to sell milk "pure from the cow." From the quality of this morning's supply, I should be inclined to fancy that that cow is suffering from an advanced stage of atrophy.
As our eldest child, aged two-and-a-half, is still totally unable to walk, and its legs have become mere shrivelled sticks, I really must call in an Analyst to test our milk.