A less old-fashioned Mary might not have found a fact conveyed as that fact was conveyed in a primary degree “interesting.”
The old-fashioned girl is not always handled tenderly by the new-fashioned girl. “Here’s a description of you,” so sneers one Muriel, and reads aloud from a book, “A young lady in the possession of all the virtues which adorn the most amiable of her sex.”
To which the Mary sneered at answers, “No, no; that flatters me.”
Lastly, there passes Emma, the old-fashioned girl who heard lately with amazement that (so the new-fashioned girl phrased the matter) “cut glass is vulgar.”
“How can,” said Emma, “glass be vulgar?”
Emma lives in a world in which not only is cut glass still in estimation, but in which the word “vulgar” is used in a sense in which it is inapplicable to glass.
Emma is very fastidious in regard to phrasing. She is never caught using the form “different to,” and she follows the rule which prescribes the use of “better,” where the ungrammatical say “best.” Of her adjectives, which are few and carefully chosen, a favourite one is “elegant,” which she uses elegantly. Her spelling has an old-fashioned look. Thus she writes shew, sew, ribband and bason. She prefers carven to “carved,” and, in regard to another past participle, she is open to the gentle satire of the Cornhill essayist, who wrote in 1885 of “very young ladies” what follows—
“They write first, ‘his health was drunk,’ and then, alarmed at the apparent inebriety of that harmless past participle, alter it incontinently to ‘his health was drank.’”
REDGAUNTLET AND BLUE-STOCKING A NOVEL COMBINATION