vulgarity, and she has the soul of a courtesan without the courtesan’s excuse. If Rhadamanthus condemns her to be perpetual chambermaid to a hostel in Hades for the souls of lost commercial travellers he will have given her an appropriate task in appropriate company. There are other types of girl whom many of us may dislike, the pseudo-Bohemian of Chelsea, the _détraquée_ enthusiast who formed in old days the main guard of Miss Pankhurst’s army, the spoiled chorus girl whom Mr Compton Mackenzie has so well depicted in “Carnival,” the horsey young lady who can talk of nothing but hunting and the merely vacuous devourer of sweets and sensational novels. Most of these, however, have some compensating virtues and the majority try, at all events, to do something more than exist. Want of opportunity or want of ambition have often landed them in their particular groove and circumscribed their natures: a sudden emergency, in their case, may bring out unsuspected powers and surprisingly latent virtues. The Bohemian young lady of Chelsea, I admit, is extremely irritating, though her worst faults appear on the surface. Her postures, if she only knew it, give an impression of shallowness and pretence, but she is a little intoxicated by the glamour of revolt against convention and the general obtuseness to things artistic, which is an undeniable and annoying fact to those who are not afflicted with it. Chelsea boasts many courageous spirits, not all of them men, however above their accomplishments their aims may be, but it gets deservedly a bad name when it takes up the attitude of regarding all life as nothing but a colour scheme, or an arrangement of line and mass. The issues of life are not all artistic: in fact, the artistic issue is only one of many, supremely important, of course, but not extremely extensive, a fact of which Murger was uncomfortably aware when he wrote the inimitable “Scènes de la Vie de Bohème.” Yet, after all, the artist must have his or her little bit of fanfaronnade, if only to keep the heart up in his desolating struggle to give expression to refractory ideas. The inexcusable beings are those who, not being in any sense artists, presume on a habitation of artistic regions to flourish the borrowed panache more furiously than its legitimate possessor.