San Antonio daily light. [volume] (San Antonio, Tex.) 1886-1907, 1891-09-11
SOCIETY IN MODERN LONDON.
No London Married Woman Ever
Was a London Girl.


Was a London Girl.
From the Speaker.
Society's scheme of activity has be-
come but ill-suited to the circumstan-
ces 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
chiefly before Easter. There, indeed
great men are to be seen in plenty,
escorting undesirable wives and still
less desirable daughters. But that Is
not society. 1t is the vestibule of the
Inferno. Society properly 30 called is
q place for boys and girls-a marriage
market. Nothing but the unconauer-
able instinct of racial preservation
can account for the stark courage
with which the British chaperon
faces the sleepIeess anguish of her
calling. Now, uhhapily, in ball
room the girls outnumber the men,
ana so per cent of them want hus-
bands, whilst as to the "men," so
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 glazing, 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 q 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
man can truthfully testify that he
ever knew a London married woman
who was London girl before she
was q married woman. While So
clety is expanding so rapidly and so
widely that even the professedly
fashionable papers have long aban-
doned any attempt to maintain the
old practice of recording the names
of the guests at its chief functions,
fashionable marriages have become
SO rare that all the evening papers
and some OF the morning papers
think them sufficiently remarkable
to give each report of from thirty to
sixty lines. The chief reas on, then
of the failure of society is that 1t does
not fulfill its raison d'etre. If the
chaperon wishes to get at the man
who is worth marrying she must al
ter her hours, cool her rooms, d
simplify her entertainm g. It'll
would pay q matchmaking mother,
far better to give twenty dinner
parties to rising barristere or civil
engineers than to entertain four hun
bred penniIess boys at q ball supper.
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 80 per cent less in gross |
rem tals; whilst the number of girls |
who consider themselves destined to |
marry land" If three times greater |
than IL was twenty years ago. Unless |
the chaperon wishes to condemn her |
daughter to perpetual celibacy, she |
must seek a husband for her: else-
where than in the London ball room,
for the London ball room is closed to |
every man who lives by his own ex-
and as for the ,'gilded youth"
he generally prefers the Cafe Royal,
or Rules, or komano's, where indeed |
he is still in society, but in society |
whose daughters attach no special |
ethical value to the mere dry cere.
mOnisl of marriage.