At the more ‘advanced’ houses, amongst the ‘smartest’ sets, the women do not retire to the drawing-room at the conclusion of dinner--they sit with the men, not infrequently; and if the usual not over-Puritanical talk that was wont to follow upon the ladies’ withdrawal is not indulged in so openly, at least the conversation is sufficiently unconventional. Slang and swearing are the commonest--in two senses--accompaniments and underlinings of the smart woman’s speech: any little disappointment that would have been ‘annoying’ to her mother is to the modern and up-to-date woman a ‘condemned nuisance,’ if not more than that; and ‘damns’ fall as readily from her lips as the mild ‘dear me!’ of a generation ago. For the first cause of this unlovely change we must look to the theatre and music-hall stages, whose women have in some few instances married the eldest sons of peers, and have succeeded to titles upon their husbands’ heirship being fulfilled. Their husbands’ titles have given them rank and precedence, whose mothers toiled at the wash-tub in some public laundry, or disputed not unsuccessfully with the most foul-mouthed of Irish viragoes on the filthy stairs of some rotten tenement in the purlieus of Saint Giles’s. The symmetry of their legs and the voluptuousness of their persons captivated the callow youths who night by night occupied the front rows of the stalls at the Gaiety Theatre, and who--under the well-known nickname of ‘Johnnies’--fed the Sacred Lamp of Burlesque with a stream of half-guineas. These heirs to wealth and hereditary honours kept the chorus-girls and skipping-rope dancers in broughams and villas _ornées_ in the classic Cyprian suburb of St. John’s Wood, and, when they were more than usually foolish, married them. Society is become, through them, quite _demimondaine_, and it is not uncommon to have pointed out to you in the Row titled women who have notoriously been under the protection of more than one man before they, by some lucky or unlucky chance, caught their coronets. Nearly all Society is free to-day to these whited sepulchres; only the Queen’s Court--that last bulwark of virtue and decency--holds out against them. Elsewhere they are more than tolerated; it is scarcely too much to say that they are admired by _fin-de-siècle_ womanhood, who are notoriously and obviously Jesuitical. If the adaptation of their _outrés_ manners is proof enough of admiration, then you shall find sufficient warranty for this statement, for the slangy girl or young married woman is rather the rule than the exception in this year of grace, and their manners are arrived at that complexion which would make their grandmothers turn in their graves, could that cold clay become sentient again for the smallest space of time.