are we monsters for all this?  Papa doesn’t grumble very much.  He has his pleasures, I’m sure.  He dined out four times the week we came away.  He was at the Casino in the Rue St. Honore last night, and came home with such an account of it that I am quite posted up in the manners and costumes of ces dames, yes, and the lower class of them.  The mean creature who has been writing in the Saturday Review gives us no benefit of clergy.  We have driven our brothers out into the night; we have sent our lovers to Newmarket; we have implored our husbands (that is, we who have got husbands,) not to come home to dinner, because we have more agreeable company which we have provided for ourselves.  Girls talk slang, I know—­perhaps they taught their brothers!  I suppose mamma taught papa to describe a woman in the Bois as ‘no end of a swell,’ and when he is in the least put out to swear at her.

[Illustration:  THE INFLEXIBLE “MEESSES ANGLAISES.”

They are not impressionable, but they will stoop to “field sports."]

“Now, my dear, shall I give you my idea of the mischief?  Papa thinks I go about with my eyes shut; that I observe nothing—­except the bonnet shops.  I say the paint, the chignons, the hoops, and the morals—­whatever they may be—­start from here.  My ears absolutely tingled the first evening I spent here en soiree.  Lovers! why the married ladies hardly take the trouble to disguise their preferences.

“I was at an embassy reception the other night.  Papa said it was like a green-room, only not half so amusing.  They talked in one corner as openly as you might speak of the Prince Imperial, about Mademoiselle Schneider’s child.  There were women of the company whose liaisons are as well known as their faces, and yet they were parfaitement bien recues!  Theresa is to be heard—­or was to be heard till she went out of fashion—­in private salons, screaming her vulgar songs among the young ladies.  When I turn the corner just outside the hotel, what do I see in one of the most fashionable print-shops?  Why, three great Mabille prints of the shockingly indecent description—­with ladies and their daughters looking at them.  Those disagreeable pictures in the Burlington Arcade are, my dearest Emmy, moral prints when compared with them.  We have imported all this.  Paris is within ten hours and a half of London, so we get French ways, as papa says, ‘hot and hot.’”

[Illustration:  ENGLISH VISITORS TO THE CLOSERIE DE LILAS.—­SHOCKING!]

“Who admires domestic women now?  Tell an English creve that Miss Maria is clever at a custard, and he will sneer at her.  No.  She must be witty, pert; able to give him as good as he sends, as people say.  Young Dumas has done a very great deal of this harm; and he has made a fortune by it.  He has brought the Casino into the drawing-room, given ces dames a position in society, and