Appendix
useful lives, seeking by such a subterfuge to make it
appear that we included in our description everybody
having a picture-gallery or holding a recognized place
in society. It is very funny, but to use a figure of the
Smart Set, it won't wash!
  "All of us, your ladyship," Lord Brougham once
said to a famous social leader, "all of us, as your
ladyship knows, have committed adultery. But we
must draw the line somewhere; and, for one, I fix it
at murder!"
  There need be no mistaking the lines that fence in
the Four Hundred. Nobody can deny, nor in truth
through all the expressions called out by our writing
do we find any denial, of the fidelity of the picture
drawn by us. It is the true, not the scurrilous, that
hurts. At the same time it is a fact that even in the
better realms of luxury and wealth there is a growing
toleration of the unclean.  Good people are not so
shocked as they once were by moral infractions.
  It is observable that the men drink less, at least at
table and in the public company of women, than they
did thirty years ago. But what the men may have
gained in this respect the women themselves have lost
by the evolution of modern society and the progress
of the desecration which that society has given the idea
of the new woman. It is a doubtful term at best. If
we would keep our women pure we must keep them
ignorant, if not of evil, at least of dirt. But what
shall be done, what can be done with those women
who insist upon knowing all that the men know, and,
by a certain not unreasonable Llaim of equality, who
propose to keep up with the masculine procession, share-
and-share alike There is not a conscientious man, not
a thoughtful woman, in the society of any of our great
centres of population, who does not mark with serious
apprehension the lowering tendencies of the time; the
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