The people with affectations and fads! I think it was Georgina Grosheim who introduced the idea of having your teeth carved, like ivory. It would have been painful to have this done in my father’s day, when people wore their own teeth! The vogue had quite a long run, though I never went in for it myself. The old Duke of Michigan, who was a great dandy, used to have a different set for every day in the week, all very elaborately carved. Children were so fond of looking at them and asking him “What’s that story about?” that he said he always went home from a children’s party with a jaw-ache. Somebody tried to introduce coloured teeth, but these were never a success. Lady Jacynth Drysdale was one of the few who were bold enough to appear in them, and even she stopped when she heard of Archie Lock’s remark about her: “I can’t bear it when that woman laughs, because it always reminds me of what I dropped last night at snooker.” The tattooing fashion did not come in till after the forties, and at first it was only done in small spirals round the arms. I never cared for tattooed backs; but they were so common at one time that when it went out, late in the sixties, we all had to take to high-necked dresses again; till then, we wore those low necks you see in the old _Punch_ pictures—I mean in the evening. Another unsuccessful experiment was made in the fifties, when women took to cutting their hair quite short, like men; I have still a chromograph of myself with my hair like that: but it was never becoming, and I fancy it was only an excuse when the doctors condemned it as unhealthy—there was a malicious story that Adèle Hopps, the American beauty who afterwards became Duchess of Lutterworth, bribed Dame Mary Sitwell, the most famous scalp specialist of the day, to issue this pronouncement. There were affectations of language, too, such as the custom (which originated, I believe, in the Smethwick family) of putting in a G wherever two vowels met at the end and the beginning of words, so that you talked, for example, about “a stuffy gatmosphere,” or “The India Goffice.” And there were affectations of dress which we have, perhaps fortunately, forgotten. In the early fifties it was quite common to see a Parisian lady going about with live birds in her hat, or an English dandy wearing bracelets, or an English lady of fashion with a “beauty patch” of black on her cheek—a revival from the seventeenth century. The mercy of these things is that they go out almost as quickly as they come in; I daresay our grandchildren will laugh at our powdered wigs and our trailing dresses!