THE VIENNESE LADY.

Press, Volume XLIV, Issue 6843, 30 August 1887, Page 5

THE VIENNESE LADY.

In a bouquet of European women the Viennese can be at once distinguished. She has a charm, a distinction, all her own. Less reserved in manner than the average Englishwoman, and less artificial than the Parisian, she makes an almost ideal hostess. Generally pretfy, always graceful, and dressed with a c7iic which she has herself invented, the Viennese is, perhaps, studied to most advantage in her own drawing-room. Watch her as she moves quietly about among her guests, charming to all alike, forgetting no one, letting no detail escape her watchful eye. Snobbishness, the darling vice of the Londoner, is unknown to the dweller in the Austrian capital, unless the unparalleled exclusiveness of the Court may be counted under this head. Many nationalities combine in the Viennese. In her we find the idealistic Hungarian, the sensuous Slav, the practical German, the impassioned Italian, and the languid Oriental, all these diverse nationalities are fused in the Austrian. These antagonistic elements are, however, corrected by a training and education more English than French in character ; for the Austrian girl is no ingCn\u, no bread-and-butter miss, even in her early teens. The public or high schools are first-rate in Vienna, and the young Austrian lady goes to and fro daily from school to home unaccompanied by servants or governesses. Her education being completed, she is introduced to society at about seventeen years of age, when she at once asserts a pretty independence of manner. If chaperons are more of an institution in Vienna than in London, the Austrian girl enjoys nearly as much liberty as her English prototype, for it is a custom at a Viennese ball for the daughters to leave their mothers or chaperons on entering the dancing-room, and to congregate together, a pretty, joyous band, at one end of the room, where they gossip and make up their programmes for the night. In the ballroom, indeed, the Viennese is seen at her best. To the magic strains of Strauss's immortal volses you see her floating round, the spirit incarnate of the dance. Light, slight, and lithe—for the Viennese have the smallest waists in Europe—she is seen to perfection in her clouds of tulle and gauze, moving swiftly but smoothly round in the arms of some blonde and martial partner. — Lady's World.