There is, however, one type of young Englishwoman, still existent, whose extinction would be a blessing. It is the type of Mr Reginald McKenna’s Sonia, that survival of Dodo into an unwilling generation. She is a limited species of course. London, money, society connections, good looks and a vivacious personality are indispensable for success in this line, and this is a combination of elements within the reach of few. Yet she does exist outside the pages of novels, and the harm that she does goes far beyond her own personal futility. She is a bad example, and unfortunately an example too widely held up to admiration. She captures the Press, which delights to reproduce her photograph in her latest posture and to record her latest bid for notoriety, while it would not dare to print a truthful account of her life, with all its vanities and selfishnesses and little immoralities. Her motto is to have a good time even if the world go to pieces. She exaggerates her ego into a god whom it is the duty of life and the world to appease by frequent offerings of incense and enjoyment. Of any duty except to look pretty she is quite unconscious. Any decent feeling she would promptly dub stuffiness. What she wants is glamour and movement from morning to night. The drab and dark side of the world is to be excluded, not by rising superior to it, but by ignoring it and debarring it from approach to the sacred presence, as the revellers in the story tried to debar the red death. It is that kind of young woman who never represses a selfish impulse and who, when self-denial on the part of the community is called for, assumes that the call is intended for the drab beings who earn a daily wage but is not to prejudice the pleasures of superior beings like herself, whose very existence is sufficient privilege for the community to warrant the transfer to its back of any burden that would legitimately have been hers. You see her often enough in London, watching the Russian ballet with an air of proprietorship, as if her appreciation was the only thing that mattered, that of the ordinary herd being cold, earthy and altogether negligible; you may see her selling programmes at charity matinées, flattering and fluttering by her radiant presence the audience—"oh, my dear, such quaint stuffy horrors!"—who buy; you will see her in the company of the rich more often than in that of the well bred, for money is to her infinitely more than manners and flashy novelty more than solid worth. She was slightly eclipsed by the war, though it gave her some admirable opportunities for self-display, but it affected her little. It neither wrung her heart nor improved her character, since it was to her but a new excitement and a source of wealth to many of her friends. She dresses garishly, she spends recklessly, she plays high, she dabbles in vice as she dabbles in movements for the sake of fresh sensations for her _blasé_ palate. With a ha’porth of wit she gilds an infinite