The women who dress to excess are balanced by the women who do not dress at all. The first are the walking advertisements of fashion, the last might be mistaken for the canvassers of old clothes' shops. The one class oppress by their magnificence, the other disgust by their dowdiness; and each ridicules the other to the indifferent third party, who, holding the scales of justice evenly, condemns both alike. Then there are the ugly women who manifestly think themselves attractive, and the pretty women who are too conscious of their charms. To be sure there are also ugly women who are content to know themselves unpersonable, as there are pretty women who are content to know that they are pretty, just as they know that they are alive, but who think no more about it, and never trouble themselves nor their neighbours by their affectations. There are the dear motherly women beyond middle age, scant of breath and incapable of exertion, who sit in the drawing-room, placid and asthmatic, and to whom every one pays an affectionate reverence; and there are the elderly women who chirrup about like young things, and skip up and down steep places with commendable agility, and who are by no means disposed to let old age have the victory for many a year to come. There are the mothers who make their lumpish children sick with a multiplicity of good things, and the mothers who never give a moment's thought to the comfort nor the well-being of theirs; the mothers who fidget their little ones and every one else by their over-anxiety, their over caution, their incessant preoccupation and fear, and the mothers who let theirs wander, and who take it quite comfortably if they do not come in even at night-fall; the mothers who prank their children out like Mayday Jacks and Jills, and the mothers who let theirs go free in rags and dirt, till you are puzzled to believe them better born than the gutter. And with all this there is the plague of the children themselves--the babies who cry all night; the two-year-olds who scream all day; the rampaging boys who haunt the stairs and passages and who will slide down the banisters on a wet afternoon; the clattering little troop playing at horses before your bedroom door, while you are lying down with a sick headache; and the irruption into the drawing-room of the young barbarians who have no nursery of their own.