The Girl of the Period, and Other Social Essays, Vol. 2 (of 2)

And what does any amount of experience do for us in the matter of friendship or love? As the world goes round, and our credulous morning darkens into a more sceptical twilight,...

Vice is bad and malignant wickedness is worse, but beyond either in evil results to mankind is weakness; which indeed is the pabulum by which vice is fed and the agent by which...

A womanly woman has neither vanity nor hardness. She may be pretty--most likely she is--and she may know it; for, not being a fool, she cannot help seeing it when she looks at h...

The old lady of strong instinctive affections, who never reflects and never attempts to restrain her kindly weaknesses, stands at the other end of the scale. She is the grandmot...

When all the fish have been tucked there is nothing for it but to row home again in the freshening morning air. The tide is rising now, and the moon is waning. The rocks look bl...

Another kind of popular woman is the sympathetic woman, the woman who gives instead of receiving. This kind is of variable conditions. She may be old, she may be ugly; in fact,...

Everything serves for a mask. A man's public character makes one which is as impenetrable in its disguise as any. The world takes one or two salient points and subordinates ever...

Great tact is required with Sweet Seventeen in such society as is allowed her; care to bring her out a little without obtruding her on the world, without making her forward and...

Year by year we meet the drawing-room epiphyte in the old haunts--at Brighton; at Ryde; at half-a-dozen good houses in London; on a visit to the friends who make much of her one...

All that excess of flattering and petting of which women are so fond becomes a bore to a man if required as part of the daily habit of life. Out in the world as he is, harassed...

Yet if there is nothing on which vague people are clear, and if they are not difficult to influence as the majority, there is much on which they are positive as a matter of priv...

By an apparent contradiction, reticent people who tell nothing are often the most charming letter-writers. Full of chit-chat, of descriptions dashed off with a warm and flowing...

There is a certain kind of woman, sweet always, who yet shows best when she is invalided. Cleared for a while from the social tangles which perplex and distress the sensitive, s...

Sometimes indeed, by their very coarseness they defeat themselves. When a woman of this kind says in a loud voice, as her final argument in a discussion, 'Then you must be a foo...

Nothing surprises men more than the odd ignorance of women concerning them; and half the unhappiness in married life, at least in England, springs from that ignorance. They cann...

The picture of a gushing creature all heart and no brains, all impulse and no ballast, is familiar to most of us; and we know her, either by repute or by personal acquaintance,...

If nothing is sacred to a sapper, neither is anything sacred to temper, ostentation, vanity; and church as little as any place else. In those thronged show-places which have wha...

If inclined to be intolerant to any one, it is to those who seek to disturb the existing state of things, or whose speculations unsettle men's minds; those who, as she thinks, e...

Sometimes she takes a craze against a voluntary; sometimes she objects to any approach to chanting; and if certain recalcitrants of the congregation, in possession of the harmon...

And really if we think of it dispassionately, and carefully dissect the great mosaic of hindrances which women say makes up the pavement of their lives, there is very little whi...

The great people do their duty as they ought, and come in their carriages; which make a show and give an air of regality to the affair. Many of them have had early high-priced t...