a town alone, after a dance she is returned as a matter of course to her mother, she is not taken out by her boys to dine at restaurants and witness musical comedies from stalls; she does not puff about the country on a motor bicycle nor flash about in the car with the chauffeur for sole cavalier; she does not make a habitual fourth at bridge nor join the lads at snooker when Mama has gone to bed. Indeed, so long as there is any alliance in prospect the French mama never goes to bed, speaking figuratively: she is conscious of the kite-string even in the majesty of her _peignoir_. The English mama, if she is sensible, takes her normal night’s rest with the addition, possibly, of a nap after lunch. She is not anxious, for, if there is one virtue in the flapper, it is her well-developed faculty of looking after herself. [2] Even M. Marcel Proust’s remarkable picture of modern “jeunes filles” in his masterpiece of discursion “A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs” does not convince me that flappers exist in France. I permit myself perhaps to speak of the young lady with a certain levity of which she would not approve, for she is apt to take herself pretty seriously, though rather as an individual than as an institution. “My dear,” I heard one say the other day, “I have just taken up theosophy: it’s too thrilling and wonderful. You can’t think what a difference it has made to me.” Her friend, I trust, did not echo my own private reflection that the difference was not yet visible externally, though possibly to the discerning eye her aura had changed colour slightly. Yet the levity, regrettable though it may be, is not in the least to be taken as a cloak for complete disapproval, however negligible such disapproval might be to its objects: it is no more than a trifling insistence—tasteless of course—on the element of comedy that twinkles round this estimable section of feminine society. I respect the flapper, in the first place, because she is on the verge of becoming the young Englishwoman than whom there is no finer creature of her kind. Imperfectly educated she certainly is; ignorance is hers without any mitigating desire for knowledge; artistically she is not successful, nor intellectually; even in dress she has yet to learn, if she ever will, the two advantages of originality and perfect finish: but all this seems almost petty when one considers how magnificent she is as a being, how well made, how frank and generous, how full of energy, how good a comrade, how pleasant a companion. These are the basic virtues of the young Englishwoman, and the flapper has them all. The worst that can be said of her, perhaps, is that she exaggerates certain characteristic shortcomings of her sex in England without contributing any particularly striking grace of her own in compensation. Is there loudness and vulgarity about, then she is conspicuously noisy; is there powder on the nose and carmine upon the