Ye gentlemen of England, who sit at home at ease, how astonished you would be to see your daughter Maud, whose husband is a well-to-do lawyer in considerable practice, setting the table herself because she cannot rely upon her servant doing it properly!  And then she goes into the kitchen, and teaches cook how to make pie-crust.  If children are numerous, or her husband is not getting on quite so well as could be wished, she will not be able to have a servant to wait at table.  What wonder, then, if she gives up late dinner and has a meat-tea, at which everything can be put on the table at once.  A colonial-bred lady has generally learnt something of good plain cooking, but the English mistress often breaks down before the serious and multifarious nature of her duties.  It is by no means uncommon for her to be suddenly left servantless for two or three days; and if she does not possess great adaptability of disposition, the whole house is bound to be at sixes-and-sevens, and all its occupants, including herself, in anything but a pleasant state of mind.  If a woman is worth her salt, she will not mind these things, or rather she will make the best of them; but it is not every English young lady whose love for her husband, present or future, will carry her through these domestic hurricanes; and, if not, she had better not come out here, although husbands are plentiful.  Except amongst a very small class who can afford luxuries, the girl-of-the-period is out of place in Australia.

DRESS.

I doubt whether in my preceding letters I have made the distinction between Melbourne and its sister capitals sufficiently plain.  I shall perhaps best convey it by saying that Melbourne is quasi-metropolitan, while both Sydney and Adelaide are alike provincial in their mode of life.  In the matters of which I have been writing, the difference has hardly been sufficient to warrant a separate treatment; but with regard to dress, it becomes so noticeable, that not to treat of Melbourne separately would convey a false idea.  For in dress it is not too much to say that the ladies of Melbourne are luxurious-a charge which could scarcely be brought against Australians in any other particular that I can think of.  And take them all-in-all, they do not dress badly; indeed, if one considers the distance from Paris, and the total want of a competent leader of fashion, they may be said to dress well, especially of late years.  The highly fantastic and gorgeous costumes for which Melbourne used to be notorious are fast disappearing.  Successful diggers no longer take their wives into a shop, and ask how much colour and stuff can be put into a dress for fifty pounds.  Already outrageousness is confined to a few, and when I say that it is generally agreed to be ’bad form,’ you will understand that its death-blow has been struck and the hearse ordered.  Bright colours are still in vogue, but they are not necessarily loud or unpleasant beneath the austral sun, and the act of combining them is beginning to be understood.  When one remembers how their houses are furnished, and what their general style of living is it is astonishing to find Melbourne ladies dressing so brilliantly and yet with so little vulgarity.