It is natural enough, that the dethroned beauties who meet us at luncheon should wonder at our enthusiasm for nymphs of bread-and-butter, and ask with a certain severity of scorn the secret of our happy mornings. The secret is simply that the buttercup is at home, and that with the close of her bondage comes a grace and a naturalness that take her out of the realms of bread-and-butter. However difficult it may be for her maturer rivals to abdicate, it is the buttercup in fact who gives the tone to the holidays. There is a subtle contagion about pleasure, and it is from her that we catch the sense of largeness and liberty and physical enjoyment that gives a new zest to life. She laughs at our moans about sunshine as she laughs at our moans about mud, till we are as indifferent to mud and sunshine as she is herself. The whole atmosphere of our life is in fact changed, and it is amusing to recognize how much of the change we owe to the buttercup. It is impossible perhaps to be whirled in this fashion out of the whisperings and boredoms of town without longing to know a little more of the pretty magician who works this wonderful transformation scene. But it is no easy matter to know much of the buttercup. Her whole charm lies in her freedom from self-consciousness; she has a reserved force of shyness behind all her familiarity, and of a very defiant sort of shyness. Her character in fact is one of which it is easier to feel the beauty than to analyse or describe it. Like all transitional phases, girlhood is full of picturesque inequalities, strange slumbers of one faculty and stranger developements of another; full of startling effects, of contrasts and surprises, of light and shade, that no other phase of life affords. Unconsciously month after month drifts the buttercup on to womanhood; consciously she lives in the past of the child. She comes to us trailing clouds of glory--as Wordsworth sings--from her earlier existence, from her home, her schoolroom, her catechism. The girl of twenty summers whose faith has been wrecked by clerical croquet looks with amazement on the implicit faith which the buttercup retains in the clergy. Even on the curate, shy and awkward as he is, she looks as on a being sacred and ineffable. Perhaps his very shyness and awkwardness creates a sympathy between the two, and rouses a keener remorse for her yawns under his sermons and a keener gratitude for the heavenly generosity with which he bestowed on her the confirmation ticket. Free as she is from fancies, her conception of the daily life of her clergyman shows amusingly enough that she can attain a very fair pitch of idealism. We remember the story of a certain parson of our acquaintance who owned to a meek little buttercup his habit of carrying a book in his pocket for reading in leisure hours. "Ah, yes," replied the eager little auditor, with a hush of real awe in her voice--"the Bible, of course! Unluckily," it was the _Physiologie du Goût_.