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 was run by men, and the ringleted sylphs of seventeen (the word "flapper" had not then cast discredit on this popular age) play very simple parts. Ruskin, it may be remembered, ardently admired these young ladies, and held them up as models of "grace, tenderness and intellectual power" to all his female readers. It never occurred to the great moralist, any more than to the great story-teller, that a girl is something more than a set of assorted virtues. "To Scott, as to most men of his age," observes an acute English critic, "woman was not an individual, but an institution—a toast that was drunk some time after Church and King."

Diana Vernon exists to be toasted. She has the

quality associated in our minds with clinking glasses, and loud-spoken loy-