(_By Mr. Punch's Own Type Writer._)

NO. XXVI.--THE LADY SHOPKEEPER.

Ladies who, in order to correct the inequalities of fortune, or to
counteract a spendthrift husband, have betaken themselves to the
keeping of shops, form a large and rapidly-increasing body. In times
so ancient as to be scarcely within the memory of a juvenile dowager,
it was held by the high dry exponents of aristocratic privilege that
to touch trade, even when it proffered a bag of money in a well-gloved
hand, was to be defiled beyond the restoring power of a Belgravian
Duchess. To be sure, even the highest and the driest of these censors
contrived to close an indulgent eye when a moneyless scion of nobility
sought to prop his tottering house by rebuilding it upon a commercial
foundation, and cementing it with the dower of a "tradesman's"
daughter. But if these blameless ones, whose exclusive dust has long
since been consigned to family vaults with appropriate inscriptions,
could have foreseen the dreadful inroads of the trading spirit, if
in a moment of prophetic rapture they could have watched the painful
decay of caste which permits a lady to dabble in bonnets, to toy with
the making of fancy frames, to cut dresses almost like a dressmaker,
and, horror of horrors, to send in bills to her customers, surely
they would have refrained from the tomb in order to stem the tide of
advancing demoralisation. But they are dead, and we who remain are
left to deal as best we may with the uncompromising spirit of the age.

[Illustration]

It is absolutely essential to the proper production of a Lady