MY DEAR FATHER,--You and my dear mother will be pleased to hear that
London continues very polite to me: that "arida nutrix leonum" enrolls
me among the pet class of lions which ladies of fashion admit into the
society of their lapdogs. It is somewhere about six years since I was
allowed to gaze on this peep-show through the loopholes of Mr. Welby's
retreat. It appears to me, perhaps erroneously, that even within that
short space of time the tone of "society" is perceptibly changed.
That the change is for the better is an assertion I leave to those who
belong to the /progressista/ party.

I don't think nearly so many young ladies six years ago painted their
eyelids and dyed their hair: a few of them there might be, imitators
of the slang invented by schoolboys and circulated through the medium
of small novelists; they might use such expressions as "stunning,"
"cheek," "awfully jolly," etc. But now I find a great many who have
advanced to a slang beyond that of verbal expressions,--a slang of
mind, a slang of sentiment, a slang in which very little seems left of
the woman and nothing at all of the lady.

Newspaper essayists assert that the young men of the day are to blame
for this; that the young men like it; and the fair husband-anglers
dress their flies in the colours most likely to attract a nibble.
Whether this excuse be the true one I cannot pretend to judge; but it
strikes me that the men about my own age who affect to be fast are a
more languid race than the men from ten to twenty years older, whom
they regard as /slow/. The habit of dram-drinking in the morning is a
very new idea, an idea greatly in fashion at the moment. Adonis calls
for a "pick-me-up" before he has strength enough to answer a
/billet-doux/ from Venus. Adonis has not the strength to get nobly
drunk, but his delicate constitution requires stimulants, and he is