Page:Daughters of Genius.djvu/532

 620 SOME LADIES OF THE OLD SCHOOL. records of the past, and noting hundreds of indications too trifling for mention, I am fully persuaded, that in our hourly intercourse with one another as mere human beings, without regard to rank or caste, we are more polite than our ancestors, — more generally considerate of one another's feelings, rights, and dignity. I was turning over in Scribner's, some time ago, " The Correspondence of the first Earl of Malmesbury." Good heavens ! what savages some of the ladies of England appear in those volumes of familiar letters ! Think of the ladies in the Pump-Room at Bath getting into a free fight, tearing one another's hair and clothes, so that the Riot Act was read, and read in vain ! We don't do so at Saratoga. We hear much now-a-days of the girl of the period. There was a Woman's Club in London composed of ladies of rank, who came and went at all hours of the night, ate, drank (drank deeply too), played for high stakes, talked loud, showed brawny arms, and boasted in loud, coarse voices of their physical prowess. A new dance came up, which these strong-minded and strong- limbed sisters much affected. It was for two couples, who began the dance by a quarrel ; next they fought a pair of duels, firing real pistols ; then the couples danced a recon- ciliation figure, which ended in an embrace; and the dance concluded with kisses, well-timed and loud, that went off like the pistols employed in the fight. The dress of these high-born barbarians w r as as monstrous as their manners. We read of one lady, who, on seeing the Duchess of Devonshire enter a room with two feathers sixteen inches high nodding from the lofty summit of her head-dress, was stricken with jealousy, and thenceforth took no com- fort in life until her undertaker gave his promise to send her two taller plumes as soon as one of his hearses came home from a job. With regard to decency, as we understand the term,