Whatever these really charming women are, or do, or wear, is exactly the right thing; and every other woman fails in proportion to the distance she is removed from this model. When a charming woman is dressed richly, the simpler costumes of her friends look poor and mean; when she is _à la bergère_, the Court dresses about her are vulgar; when she is gay, quietness is dullness; when she is quiet, laughter is coarse. And there is no use in trying to imitate her. She is the very Will-o'-the-wisp of her circle, and no sooner shows her light here than she flits away there; she has no sooner set one fashion, which her admiring friends have adopted with infinite pains and trouble, than she has struck out a new one which renders all the previous labour in vain. This is part of her very essence; and the originality which is simply perfection that cannot be repeated, and not eccentricity that no one will imitate, comes in as one of the finest and most potent of her charms. When she lends her patterns to her friends, or tells them this or that little secret, she laughs in her heart, knowing that she has shown them a path they cannot possibly follow and raised up a standard to which they cannot attain. And even should they do either, then she knows that, by the time they have begun to get up to her, she will be miles away, and that no art whatever can approximate them to her as she is. What she was she tosses among them as a worn-out garment; what she is they cannot be. She remains still the unapproachable, the inimitable, the charming woman _par excellence_ of her set, whom none can rival. _APRON-STRINGS._