"No more I have," she replied, putting on a very languid air, "but I am very _delicate_." This term _delicate_, be it known to my readers is a favourite one with young ladies here, but its general application would lead you to imagine it another term for _laziness_. It is quite fashionable to be _delicate_, but horribly vulgar to be considered capable of enjoying such a useless blessing as good health. I knew a lady, when I first came to the colony, who had her children daily washed in water almost hot enough to scald a pig. On being asked why she did so, as it was not only an unhealthy practice, but would rob the little girls of their fine colour, she exclaimed,-- "Oh, that is just what I do it for. I want them to look _delicate_. They have such red faces, and are as coarse and healthy as country girls." The rosy face of the British emigrant is regarded as no beauty here. The Canadian women, like their neighbours the Americans, have small regular features, but are mostly pale, or their faces are only slightly suffused with a faint flush. During the season of youth this delicate tinting is very beautiful, but a few years deprive them of it, and leave a sickly, sallow pallor in its place. The loss of their teeth, too, is a great drawback to their personal charms, but these can be so well supplied by the dentist that it is not so much felt; the thing is so universal that it is hardly thought detrimental to an otherwise pretty face. But, to return to the mere pretenders in society, of which, of course, there are not a few here, as elsewhere. I once met two very stylishly-dressed women at a place of public entertainment. The father of these ladies had followed the lucrative but unaristocratic trade of a tailor in London. One of them began complaining to me of the mixed state of society in Canada, which she considered a dreadful calamity to persons like her and her sister; and ended her lamentations by exclaiming,-- "What would my pa have thought could he have seen us here to-night? Is it not terrible for ladies to have to dance in the same room with storekeepers and their clerks?" Another lady of the same stamp, the daughter of a tavern-keeper, was indignant at being introduced to a gentleman, whose father had followed the same calling. Such persons seem to forget, that as long as people retain their natural manners, and remain true to the dignity of their humanity, they cannot with any justice be called vulgar; for vulgarity consists in presumptuously affecting to be what we are not, and in claiming distinctions which we do not deserve and which no one else would admit.