attainments that are usually dignified with this epithet. History and
geography, classics and mathematics, modern languages (her own and
those of foreign nations), all these she candidly despises. Let others
make their nests upon the shady branches of the tree of learning. For
herself she is fain to soar into the empyrean of society, and to gaze
with undazzled eyes into the sun of the smart set. She has of course
had the advantage of teachers of all sorts, but the claims made upon
her time by thoughtless parents have usually been so great as to leave
her at the end of her school-room period with a few brittle fragments
of knowledge, which shift and change in her mind as the bits of glass
might shift in a kaleidoscope from which the looking-glass had been
omitted. It is enough for her if, in place of historical dates, she
knows the fashionable fixtures, whilst Sandown and Kempton, Ascot and
Goodwood, Hurlingham, and the Ranelagh, supply her with a variety
of knowledge infinitely more interesting and "actual" than the dry
details of population, area, climate, and capital towns, which may be
learnt (by others) from primers of geography.

Although it is, from their and her point of view, eminently desirable
that the parents of the Hurlingham Girl should be rich, yet it is by
no means absolutely necessary. It is, however, essential that they
should possess a social position which will ensure to them and to
their daughter an easy entrance into that world which considers
itself, not perhaps better, but certainly good. Her mother has
probably discovered long since that the task of being thwarted by
her daughter is an intolerable addition to her social burdens. She
therefore permits her, with as much resignation as she can command, to
take her own course in all those matters that do not conflict directly
with the maternal plans, and she may even come to take a pride in the
bold and dashing independence by which her daughter seeks to relieve