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Show SOCIETY IX MODERX LOXHOX. No Ixmdon Married Woman Ever Was a Eondon Girl. Speaker. Society's scheme of activity has become J.ut ill-suited to the circumstances of 'nodern England. The first thing that one .iOtOs cu i uttrhia; ILo great '.vorld li tiat there are no great men there. Wrc do not ! speak here of the claret-cup crushes where ' the people of political taste gather chiefly before Easter. There indeed great men are to be seen in plenty, escorting undesirable wives and still less desrable daughters. But that is not socity. It is the vestibule of the Inferno. Society, properly so called is a place 1 tor boys ana gins a marriage marh.ei. Nothing butjjthc unconquerable instinct of ac e preservation can account for the stark courage whith w hich the British chaperon races the sleepless anguish of her calling- Now, unhappily in a ball room the girls outnumber the men, and 99 per cent of them want husbands, whilst as to the "men," 80 per cent of them are as little able to finance a nureery as to finance the Itailan opera. Nothing is looked for from them hut that they should keep sober and break to the eye by their black garmeuts the glaring gloom y banks of unmarried musin. There are plenty of men in London who cau marry and do marry but when the time has arrived when their circumstances justify the step, they do not seek to enter society in order to choose a wife. They arrange for a three days holiday and run down to the country where they propose to the old love of long ago. No average aver-age man can truthfully testify that he ever knew a London girl before she was a married mar-ried woman. While society is ex-panding ex-panding so rapidly and so widely that even the professedly fashionable fashion-able papers have long abandoned any attempt to maintain the old practice of recording rec-ording the names of the guests at its chief functions, fashionable marriages have become so rare that all the morning papers think them sufficiently remarkadle to give each a report of from thirty to sixty lines. The chief reason, then, of the failure of society so-ciety is that it does not fulfil its reason d'etre.. If the chaperon wishes to get at the man who is worth marrying, she must alter hours, cool her rooms, and simplify her euj tertainments. It would pay a match- making mother tar better to give twenty ttinner parties par-ties to rising barristers or civil enginers than to entertain four hundred penniless boys at a ball supper Unfortunately for the chaperon she can not rid herself of the idea that her daughter's domestic happiness must be based on land. She forgets that the land of England is more heavily mortgaged than of yore and that it yields 30 per cent less in gross rentals whilst the number of girls who consider themselves destined to "marry land" is three times greater than it was twenty years ago. Unless the" chaperon w ishes to condemn her daughter to prepetual celibacy, she must seek a husband tor her elsewhere than in the London ball room, for the London hall room is closed to every man who li'c3 by his own exertions: and as for tho "gilded youth" he generally perfers the Cafe Royal, or Rule's or Roman's where indeed in-deed Le is slill in society, but in a society whose daughters attach no special ttbieal value to the more dry ceremonial of marriage. |