Even their sisters, nurtured in luxury, and taught, as they still unhappily are, that elegant idleness is the proper portion of the sex, are beginning to rebel. They are seeking knowledge eagerly, sometimes in places and under circumstances that promise not the best of results. More particularly during the past five or ten years there has been the really extraordinary propaganda amongst the women of the younger set in our great cities looking toward the strengthening of the body and the building up of a vigorous and buoyant health that would have been considered actually vulgar in the generation that preceded them. Health, in fact, in many of the younger sets, has become almost a religion, a sort of fetich. They study hygiene, biology, and the mystery of life. Perhaps they are coming to know too much at too early an age, but in excuse let it be said that it is far better to know too much than to know too little. On the other hand, I have already written of the tendency of the fashionable young women of the day toward charity and reform. They follow fads madly, working as hard and using up as much nerve force in this pursuit as any young woman of the middle class gives to her household work, or even to her bread-winning activities. I could name a dozen young women of the finest families in New York who within the past twelve months have actually thrown themselves into this sort of function with such fiery ardour and zeal that they have either totally neglected their social activities or broken down completely under the strain of double labour. Such instances are more numerous year by year. I do not know that I fully approve it, but I set it down here for the judgment of the world. So, on the one hand, the ranks of the doomed class are being swiftly depleted by what I must call rank out and out desertion. The idle rich, particularly the younger set, are depleted year by year by squadrons of young men and women who go over to the army of workers. I do not know that there is any one single sign in the world in which I live that gives me greater hope than this. The dishonour of inactivity, sloth, and idleness is coming to be widely recognized in the very best classes of Society. Old prejudices are breaking down under the demands of the younger men for something to do. Even labour with the hands is not beneath them. As I pause to think, I could name at least half a dozen young men of my own set who within the past two or three years have gone into the railroad business, carried chains with engineering gangs in the field, or done other real manual labour. To-day the son of one of the oldest and noblest families in New York is superintending the laying of sewers in a New England town under a municipal contract.