He touched on some problems of flapperdom in “The Awkward Age” it is true, but the unfortunate Nanda was very much “out” when she began so disconcertingly to complicate the existence of her not too admirable mother. No, the flapper suddenly burst upon an amazed nineteenth century at the moment of its exit in an odour of decadence and Yellow Bookery—how Maudle and Postlethwaite would have hated her!—and rode in triumphantly on the first wave-crest of the twentieth century, a callow Venus with her hands on her hips and her tongue in her cheek. At present the flapper is English entirely, except in so far as she is also American, and of her mode of existence in that mighty country in which the pretensions of all the female sex are allowed to be infinite and where Ella Wheeler Willcox played Corinna in her teens I am not competent to speak. At what age the mantle of bright omnipotence is allowed to be put on with the petticoat is hidden from me. At all events the English flapper is alone in Europe. In Germany, I imagine, her counterpart is still the unwieldy “Backfisch,” with her plait of coarse light hair and her bob of salutation. She is not a creature of much account: professors feed her mind with knowledge and she feeds her body with chocolate and cream cakes. In France, the most progressive of all Latin countries, the “jeune fille” is still not emancipated,[2] in spite of Mademoiselle Lenglen, who has won her way in a censorious world with a tennis racquet. Emancipation is, after all, the note of the flapper: she gives no impression of being held in trust. The “jeune fille” is very much held in trust, a trust which even the most predatory Frenchman will respect. If she is allowed at all to fly, it is as a balloon or a kite at the end of string securely tied to her mother’s apron-strings. She is held in trust, of course, for marriage, an affair which in England is becoming more and more haphazard. For us, whatever other qualities marriage may have—and these may be exquisite—it must, at the least, promise a little diversion. The French, on the contrary, are ready, if need be, to follow Mrs Malaprop’s maxim of beginning with a little aversion. To us, according to our natures, marriage may be primarily a sacrament, an enchantment, or a consummation, but to the French it is essentially an alliance, a solemn and stately word which they properly apply to the wedding ring. With this in prospect little kites must not be allowed to fly too high, nor to become unconscious of the string. They may aspire to greater freedom as much as they please, since it will inevitably come; their curiosities about that free state are not discouraged nor are the arts and graces by which they will shape the most triumphant course untrammelled forgotten; and the joys to which they may attain are kept before them to console them for what they must renounce in the probationary stage. The “jeune fille” may not walk the street of