No lines by an English poet have better crystallised the impression of English womanhood at the moment of its emergence from the chrysalis. The impression, of course, is enormously heightened when it is conveyed in the mass, as in a ceremony at a girls’ school or the sight of the same school progressing formally to church _en crocodile_. A boy, in the glory of his physical strength and agility, may find it easy to forget the stateliness of one or two, as I did that of my cousins, but no boy exists who would not quail before a combined manifestation. And yet what were these but flappers, a word which no longer needs inverted commas? It is a typically English product, that quintessence of pertness and levity, that preposterous imitation and caricature of womanhood, that graceless state of pigtaildom, that compound of vanity, _abandon_, chatter and chocolates, that innocent rakishness, that perverse chastity, that boundless but unconcentrated desire, that rapt satisfaction with the present, that gorgeous hopefulness of the future, that delight to the eye, that distress to the ear; those rosebuds in boys’ buttonholes, those thorns in mothers’ sides, those blankets of intelligent conversation, those pitchers with capacious ears, those graceful runners and hideous walkers, those creatures of soft cheeks, shy souls and shameless hearts, the English flappers. The rise of this phenomenon to a precocious but perfectly definite position in society has been extremely rapid. Half of the present generation in England can remember when flappers were not, and there is no sign in previous history that they were ever intended to be. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance women became wives so early that there was no time for flapperdom, yet any flapper of to-day has more independence than the wife of many a knight who flaunted on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The Puritans did not encourage precocity in young women, and as for the Merry Monarch, there is no record that he paid attentions to ladies who were not yet out. The formal eighteenth century kept young ladies very much “in” till they were married, and this perhaps over-repressive attitude continued well into the Victorian age. The flapper, it must be remembered, is not merely a young woman; if she were no more, she would find her parallel in many a heroine of history or fiction. She is more than young, she is immature: she trades upon her immaturity, using it as a temptation, a protection and an excuse. Her hair is down and her skirts are up—though not much more up to-day, I fear, than those of her aunts—and her imitations of maturity are more in the domain of conduct than of dress or deportment. Until the other day this cheerful being did not exist. Who can imagine Miss Bennet or Emma Woodhouse as flappers? What flapper entered the ken of Dickens or Thackeray or George Meredith, except as a monstrosity? Even Henry James was too early for the flapper, with all his tremendous apparatus of modernity.