On the day when she collapses into an old woman she is lost. She has nothing for it then but to withdraw from the brilliant drawing-rooms she has so long haunted into dingy lodgings in a back street, and live as her mother lived before her. Forgotten by the world which she has spent her life in waiting on, she has leisure to reflect on the relative values of things, and to lament, as she probably will, that she gave living grain for gilded husks; that she exchanged the realities of love and home, which might have been hers had she been contented to accept them on a lower social scale, for the barren pleasures of the day and the delusive hope of marrying well in a sphere where she had no solid foothold. She had her choice, like others; but she chose to throw for high stakes at heavy odds, and in so doing let slip what she originally held. The bird in the hand might have been of a homely kind enough; still, it was always the bird; while the two golden pheasants in the bush flew away unsalted, and left her only their shadows to run after. On the whole then, we incline to the belief that the drawing-room epiphyte is a mistake, and that those stray damsels who wander about society unattended by any natural protector and always more or less in the character of adventuresses, would do better to keep to the sphere determined by parental circumstances than to let themselves be taken into one which does not belong to them and which they cannot hold. And furthermore it seems to us that, irrespective of its present instability and future fruitlessness, the position of a drawing-room epiphyte is one which no woman of sense would accept, and to which no woman of spirit would submit. _THE EPICENE SEX._ There has always been in the world a kind of women whom one scarcely knows how to classify as to sex; men by their instincts, women by their form, but neither men nor women as we regard either in the ideal. In early times they were divided into two classes; the Amazons who, donning helmet and cuirass, went to the wars that they might be with their lovers, or perhaps only for an innate liking for rough work; and the tribe of ancient women, so withered and so wild, who should be women yet whose beards forbade men so to account them, and for whom public opinion usually closed the controversy by declaring that they were witches--that is, creatures so unlike the rightful woman of nature that only the devil himself was supposed to be answerable for them. These particular manifestations have long since passed away, and we have nowadays neither Amazons learning the goose-step in our barrack-yards, nor witches brewing hell-broth on Scottish moors; but we have the Epicene Sex all the same--women who would defy the acutest social Cuvier among us to classify, but who are growing daily into more importance and making continually fresh strides in their unwholesome way.