Elizabeth wears boots with toe-caps, and is, we who know her believe, the last girl who will use the phrase, “canons of good taste.” [Illustration: A VISITATION _There Mrs. Bile I’ve brought you another little pie of my own making_] Betsy wears in winter a crotcheted muffler and Ringwood gloves. She always says at a visit’s end, “Now I must be going,” and generally says that she has “paid a visitation.” This makes new-fashioned people smile, and, as Betsy only says it when in merry pin, this pleases her. Betsy is a wag in her old-fashioned way. Thus she always counts her cherry-stones, and affects distress if they come to _never_. This also makes new-fashioned people smile. Bessy we call “the quotation girl.” To Bessy, coffee is “the fragrant juice of Mocha’s berry brown,” and Bessy at the tea-table refers to “the cups that cheer, but not inebriate.” Bessy will herself only be described in a quotation— “Old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good.” Bess uses what we others call “dictionary words”—such words as _pusillanimity_ and _titillation_. Bess—does this need telling?—hails from beyond Tweed. Next passes Susan, who says, “Papa and mamma,” when she does not say “Father and mother.” The new-fashioned girl says “papa and mother.” Susan, too, prefers the word “lady” to “woman,” and “gentleman” to “man.” In fact, she has somewhat aristocratic leanings; but condescension is no part of her manner, for she knows that politeness levels up. Next pass the Marys, some of whom are Pollys. [Illustration: MINERVA An old-fashioned girl] Polly, number one, combines a love of cookery with a love of bookery, to phrase the matter as a certain poet would have phrased it, and to these loves she adds a third, the love of needlework. If you should tell her that a good needlewoman makes a bad student, she will tell you in reply that Minerva beat Arachne in the art of needlework. She is so far from being a bad student that it is only part of her knowledge to know that. Polly, number two, is not learned at all, but is of marvellous dexterity with her fingers. She should have lived in the days of spears and spindles, some people say. These people are of those who have nothing in their heads but a tongue. Of the Marys called Mary, there passes first that Mary to whom, albeit her home is London, a Monday Popular Concert is not “a Pop,” and to whom a photograph is not a _photo_. Next passes the Mary to whom an Ellen said— “You must have been born grown-up, like a fly, Mary.” To whom Mary: “What do you mean?” “Why, don’t you know, goose, that flies don’t grow, that they—let me think of the way it’s put in the books—emerge from the larva in a perfect state?” To which Mary, dreamily: “Do they? That’s very interesting.” A less old-fashioned Mary might not have found a fact conveyed as that fact was conveyed in a primary degree “interesting.”