lips, then her nose and lips are especially ridiculous; is there a shrill tone, the highest note will be a flapper’s; is there a tendency for the eye to rove, it will be particularly unsuitable in a cheeky orb peeping from a pigtailed head. Her elemental good qualities, at which she would be inclined to turn up her nose, are her principal jewels together with a certain lithe and tempting picturesqueness which is all her own: she is to be loved, at all events, by the discriminating for her promise rather than for her performance and for her very brilliant testimony to the excellence of a social system which encourages and approves this independence in the young. It may be said that the flapper in general is too eager to discount, as she usually does, the pleasures of maturity, but probably this is better for her, in the present and in the future, than to be kept in a state of impatient yearning, of greedy _Sehnsucht_, which checks the naturally charming spontaneity of her development. In fact, flappers are good and desirable things provided that they do not become _too_ obvious. There is a certain reason for insistence on this excellent proviso. It may seem paradoxical to argue that the most modern tendency to blur the line of demarcation between the flapper and her elders is a sign of over-obviousness on the part of the former. This line, externally at all events, used to be firmly marked, by the hair on the brow and the skirt about the knee: but now the general cult, bobbed head and the free knee, has made this double line delusive. Short of a study of census returns it would be difficult to tell where the flapper ends and the woman begins. And this confusion—which is my point—does not mean the elimination of the flapper as a separate identity, but rather a prolongation of the flapper standard beyond its legitimate limits. It argues, to my mind, a deplorable abandonment of her own standard on the part of the older woman. Herrick could no longer apostrophise in ecstasy the “sweet liquefaction of her clothes” when he saw his Julia striding along in a woollen jumper and a short tweed skirt with a pudding basin pressed down over her mediæval bob. Woman’s gift is to give line and animation to drapery, to oppose graciousness of the curve to the masculine rectilinear, and to contrast the poetry of motion with the prose of mere movement. Why is it decreed to-day that all women should By hook or crook Contrive to look Both angular and flat—