“I know, dear ladies, that you are angry at this statement. But, even at the risk of displeasing _you_, we must tell the truth. You would wish to represent yourselves as equitable, logical, and strictly just. * * * Women equitable, logical, and strictly just! Mercy upon us! If they were, population would cease, the world would be a howling wilderness.” The apologist errs, however, in supposing that any ladies,--real or fictitious, his own characters or others’,--are angry at his accusation of injustice. Helen Pendennis, Amelia Sedley, even Ethel Newcome and Lady Castelwood, would be flattered; Becky Sharp and Beatrix Esmond would not care. And as for Caroline Helstone, Violet Effingham, Diana Warwick, Sandra Belloni, they are too far away to be disturbed by either smoke or aroma. For half our novelists, the woman question as such did not exist, and about the same number show little or no interest in the world of fashion, though the two lists coincide only in part. Lytton, Thackeray, Trollope, Meredith, and in a small way, Kingsley, have grudges against society in addition to its treatment of women and women’s influence on it; while Disraeli, Dickens, and Butler have some general gibes at social follies. From first to last in his near-half-century of writing, Lytton, himself to the manner born, loved to prick the social bubble. In youth he says:[279] “The English of the fashionable world make business an enjoyment, and enjoyment a business: they are born without a smile; they rove about public places like so many easterly winds--cold, sharp, and cutting; * * * while they have neglected all the graces and charities of artifice, they have adopted all its falsehood and deceit.” Mr. Howard de Howard, rebuking a drawing room smart set, speaks for himself and his class:[280] “Gentlemen, I have sate by in silence and heard my king derided, and my God blasphemed; but now when you attack the aristocracy, I can no longer refrain from noticing so obviously intentional an insult. _You have become personal._” When young Chillingly absconds for a taste of real life, he leaves a letter for his father in which he promises a safe return, and adds,--[281] “I will then take my place in polite society, call upon you to pay all expenses, and fib on my own account to any extent required by that world of fiction which is peopled by illusions and governed by shams.” In his first adventure, masquerading as a yeoman, he is quizzed by Uncle Bovill on topics for the intelligent,--politics, agriculture, finance. To maintain his incognito, he affects ignorance; and is astonished at the triumphant deduction,--[282] “Just as I thought, sir; you know nothing of these matters--you are a gentleman born and bred--your clothes can’t disguise you, sir.”