but who belonged to that /jeunesse doree/ with which the surface of life
patrician is fretted over--young men with few ideas, fewer duties--but
with plenty of leisure--plenty of health--plenty of money in their
pockets--plenty of debts to their tradesmen--daring at Melton--scheming
at T'attersall's--pride to maiden aunts--plague to thrifty fathers--
fickle lovers, but solid matches--in brief, fast livers, who get through
their youth betimes, and who, for the most part, are middle-aged before
they are thirty--tamed by wedlock--sobered by the responsibilities that
come with the cares of property and the dignities of rank--undergo abrupt
metamorphosis into chairmen of quarter sessions, county members, or
decorous peers;--their ideas enriched as their duties grow--their
opinions, once loose as willows to the wind, stiffening into the
palisades of fenced propriety--valuable, busy men, changed as Henry V.,
when coming into the cares of state, he said to the Chief Justice, "There
is my hand;" and to Sir John Falstaff,

"I know thee not, old roan;
Fall to thy prayers!"

But meanwhile the elite of this /jeunesse doree/ glittered round Flora
Vyvyan: not a regular beauty like Lady Adela--not a fine girl like Miss
Vipont, but such a light, faultless figure--such a pretty radiant face--
more womanly for affection to be manlike--Hebe aping Thalestris. Flora,
too, was an heiress--an only child--spoilt, wilful--not at all
accomplished--(my belief is that accomplishments are thought great bores
by the jeunesse doree)--no accomplishment except horsemanship, with a
slight knack at billiards, and the capacity to take three whiffs from a
Spanish cigarette. That last was adorable--four offers had been advanced
to her hand on that merit alone.--(N.B. Young ladies do themselves no
good with the jeunesse doree, which, in our time, is a lover that rather