But while these young reputations are still to make in the great world, let us not, as Mrs. Gamp says, proticipate; let us keep our high estimate of them modestly to ourselves, and not stick them up on the classic shelf among the best bindings before their time. What makes it worse is that the coteries are apt to have no classic shelf. Their walls are lined and their boudoir tables littered with new books, and nothing but new books. Women are great offenders in this way, especially the women whom American journals call “Society Ladies”—who are accustomed, in the absence of contradiction and criticism and other correctives (tabooed as “bad form”), to mistake their wayward fancies for considered judgments. We want a modern Molière to write us another _Femmes Savantes_. (I present the idea to Mr. Bernard Shaw. They have dubbed him “the English Molière.” Well, here’s a chance for him to make good.) There is Lady Dulcibella. She is always recommending you a new book that nobody else has ever heard of. “Oh, how perfectly sweet of you to call on this horrid wet afternoon! _Have_ you read ‘Mes Larmes’? It’s written by a Russian actress with such wonderful red hair, you can’t think, and they say she was a princess, until those dreadful Bolshevists, you know. We met her at Florence in the winter, and everybody said she was just like one of the Botticellis in the Accademia. They _do_ say that Guido da Verona—or D’Annunzio, or somebody (don’t you think that horrid little D’Annunzio is just like a frog?)—was quite mad about her. But ‘Mes Larmes’ is perfectly _sweet_, and don’t forget to order it. Two lumps or three?” And listen to the chatter of some of those wonderfully bedizened ladies who variegate, if they don’t exactly decorate, the stalls of one of our Sunday coterie theatres. The queer books they rave about! The odd Moldo-Wallachian or Syro-Phœnician dramatists they have discovered!