And Lady Mordaunt is not alone among her aristocratic sisters of London. She has a number of imitators, who talk "fast," ride "fast" horses, frequent the company of "fast" men, and visit with these last, "fast" places of amusement. This "fast" woman has now become typical in England. She dyes her hair, she paints her face, she wears flaunting and unbecoming costumes after the style of the loose living blondes who appear in burlesque; in short, she apes the manners and the attire of that hapless class of women of whom she once spoke, when she spoke of them at all--with a shuddering thrill of mingled horror and pity. A famous female English novelist--whose heroines, by the way, are all of the light-hair-dye and "fast" type--speaking of these "fast" society-women, pertinently asks:-- [Sidenote: SLANG WOMEN AND "MRS. JOHNSON."] "Who taught the girls of England this hateful slang? who showed them--nay, obtruded upon and paraded before them these odious women? who, indeed, but the men, who recoil from their own work of their own hands, and cry out upon the consequences of their own conduct? It was not till the young Englishman learned to ridicule everything virtuous as "spoony," and everything domestic as "slow," that the women took pains to master the slang of the race-course, and to model their dress upon the costumes of the women whom they saw from their carriage windows dimly athwart the mists of midnight flitting across the Haymarket, as they were driven away from the Opera-house. Be sure society decayed, like the tree to which poor Swift pointed with sad prophetic certainty, "_first at top_." It was not till the moral deterioration of the modern young man had become a fact but too obvious, that any fatal change was perceived in the modern young woman; it was not until a contemptuous and disrespectful demeanor to parents, newly denominated governors, relieving-officers, paters, maters, maternals; a scornful avoidance of sisters as muffs and dowdies; an utter irreverence for age, and a disdainful treatment of all woman kind,--had become distinguishing characteristics of young Mr. Bull, that poor, giddy, mistaken Miss Bull, too anxious to please the young cub, whose moral being and real interests had best been served by a judicious course of cat-o'-nine-tails, began to dye her pretty hair and paint her fresh young cheeks; it was not till the British lords flocked to the sale of a bankrupt courtesan's effects, and gave unheard-of sums for the tawdry crockery-ware of a courtesan's bedchamber, that British ladies began to slide downwards upon that fatal incline which their masters had smoothed for them."