Iron County register. [volume] (Ironton, Iron County, Mo.) 1867-1965, 1891-12-03
SOCIETY IN MODERN LONDON.
No London Married Woman Ever Was a
London Girl.

NO London Married Woman Ever Was q
London Girl.
Society's scheme of activity has be-
| come but ill-suited to the circumstances
| of modern England. The first thing
that one notes on entering the great
world is that there are no great men
there. We do not speak here of the
claret-cup brushes where the people of
political taste gather-chief1y before
! Easter. There, indeed, great men are
to be seen in plenty, escorting I'M
desirable wives and still less desirable
daughters. But that is not society. 1t
is the vestibule of the inferno. Society
properly SO called is place for boys
and girls-a marriage market. Moth
ing but the unconquerable in
stincts of racial preservation can ac-
count for the stark courage with which
the British chaperon faces the sleepless
anguish of her calling Now, unhappily
in ballroom the girls outnumber the
men and ninety-nine per cent. of them
want husbands, while as to the ''men,"
eighty per cent. of them are as little
able to finance nursery as to finance
the italian opera. Nothing is looked
for from them but that they should
keep sober and break to the eye by their
black garments the glaring, gloomy
banks of unmarried muslin. There are
plenty of men in London who can
marry and do marry, but when the
time has arrived when their circum-
stances justify the step, they do not
seek to enter society in order to choose
a wife. They arrange a three days
holiday and run down to the country,
where they propose to the old love of
long ago. No average man can truth
fully testify that he ever knew Lon
don married woman who was London
girl before she was a married woman.
While society is expanding so rapidly
and so widely that even the professed-
ly fashionable papers have long aban-
doned any attempt to maintain the old
practice of recording the names of the
guests at its chief functions, fashion
able marriages have become SO rare
that all the evening papers and some of
the morning papers think them sufi-
GENTLY remarkable to give each a re-
port OF from thirty to sixty lines. The
chief reason, then, of the failure of So
ciety is that it does not fulfill its raison
d'etre. If the chaperon wishes to get
at the man who is worth marrying she
must alter her hours, cool her rooms,
and simplify her entertainments. It
would pay n matchmaking mother far
better to give twenty dinner parties to
rising barristers or civil engineers than
to entertain four hundred penniless boys
at ball supper. Unfortunately for
the chaperon, she can not rid herself of
the idea that her daughters 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 thirty 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 wishes to condemn her
daughter to perpetual celibacy she
must seek husband elsewhere than in
the London ballroom, for the London
ballroom is closed to every man who
lives by his own exertions, and as for
the 'gilded youth" he generally pre-
fers the Cafe Royal, or Rules, or
Romano's, where, indeed. he is still in
society, but in a society whose daugh-
tiers attach no special ethical value to
the mere dry ceremonial of marriage
r