Her nature is gentle, her affections are large, her passions small. She may have prejudices, but they are prejudices of a mild kind, mainly on the side of modesty and tenderness and the quietude of true womanhood. She is woman throughout, without the faintest dash of the masculine element in mind or manners; and she aspires to be nothing else. She carries with her an atmosphere of happiness, of content, of spiritual completeness, of purity which is not prudery. Her life is filled with a variety of interests; consequently she is never peevish through monotony, nor yet, on the other hand, is she excited, hurried, storm-driven, as those who give themselves up to 'objects,' and perfect nothing because they attempt too much. She is popular, because she is beautiful without being vain; loving without being sentimental; happy in herself, yet not indifferent to others; because she understands her drawing-room duties as well as her domestic ones, and knows how to combine the home life with social splendour. This is the best type of the popular pretty woman to whom is given admiration, and against whom no one has a stone to fling nor a slander to whisper; and this is the ideal woman of the English upper-class home, of whom we still raise a few specimens, just to show what women may be if they like, and what sweet and lovely creatures they are when they are content to be as nature designed them. Another kind of popular woman is the sympathetic woman, the woman who gives instead of receiving. This kind is of variable conditions. She may be old, she may be ugly; in fact, she is more often both than neither; but she is a universal favourite notwithstanding, and no woman is more sought after nor less wearied of, although few can say why they like her. She may be married; but generally she is either a widow or an old maid; for, if she be a wife, her sympathies for things abroad are necessarily somewhat cramped by the pressure of those at home;--and her sympathies are her claim to popularity. She is sincere too, as well as sympathetic, and she is safe. She holds the secrets of all her friends; but no one suspects that any before himself has confided in her. She has the art, or rather the charm, of perpetual spiritual freshness, and all her friends think in turn that the fountain has been unsealed now for the first time. This is not artifice; it is simply the property of deep and inexhaustible sympathy. It is not necessary that she should be a wise adviser to be popular. Her province is to listen and to sympathize; to gather the sorrows and the joys of others into her own breast, so as to soften by sharing or heighten by reduplication. Most frequently she is not over rigid in her notions of moral prudence, and will let a lovesick girl talk of her lover, even if the affair be hopeless and has been forbidden; while she will do her best to soothe the man who has had the misfortune to get crazed about his friend's wife. She has been