THE FASHIONABLE WIFE.

Grey River Argus, Volume 21, Issue 3097, 19 July 1878, Page 2

THE FASHIONABLE WIFE.

(truth.) A fashionable wife ia a woman who marries neither for love nor for respect, but only for a banker's book and a social position. She has a house but no home ; an establishment bufc no family ; a husband, but neither companion, nor friend, nor yet lover in him. These live on the other side of the street-door ; and the fashionable wife finds in them all thafc she refuses to her lawful proprietor. She goes in for free-trade in life, and holds that marriage should be no more a huis clos than the corn-sack or the wine-vat. If she has social ambition as well as personal vanity, ahe goes in for every new invention by which modern women are seeking to throw off the graver restraints of an older and sweeter time that they, may live in the light of liberty,' unshackled by modes.y or reticence. She haunts epicene clubs and sits on close committees! is always to the front iv tableaux vivants, where she invents startling combinations of drapery which betrays more than ifc conceals, and plans poses which suggest more than they explain ; or she takes parfc in private theatricals when the play contains spice, and values her reputation as an actress : mere than anything else that can be said of her. If she has a shadow of literary : talent, she writes love poems with the (fainfc echo of Swinburne in their method ; jor a novel which she makes significant by asterisks, and conspicuous by its audacity of stylefas well a3 of atory ; or, if she is a paiu ter in her degree, she dashes off bold sketches from nature and the nude, and holds her studio — with that locked I: Japanese cabinet on the table— as a kind jof back parlour behind fche shop, where 'only those are admitted who can say " Shibboleth" withoufc lisping. The fame of thafc studio, arid the courage of those sketches, runs like an underground fire , among her society ; and the number of 'men who dp say "Shibboleth,"* and do not lisp, becomes as many as those rings in the Arabian Nights tales which the lady took from her box while the genie was sleeping, and counted, smiling, as her trophies. v For the fashionable wife has loyers as part of the necessary furniture of her existence. She lives for society, not for home ; for men, not the one man ; and Vanity Pair is the only conception of Paradise to which she can attain. The fashionable wife refuses absolutely all obedience to the law of duty, all recognition, indeed, thafc she has any duty at aU, especially to'the community as a community, aud not merely a fashionable assemblage of holders of drawing-rooms and givers of dinner-parties, . . The desire of

the man who haa married her for a family to carry on the name and traditions of his house, is something inexpressibly sbhorrenfc to her. She does not care for children in the abstract ; and to be a mother on her own account {is a corvie to which she will not submit. It interferes too much wifch her plan of life aa she ;has laid it down ; spoils her figure, cuts her oufc of pleasures, makea her uncomfortable, and in every way a nuiaance fchat has no compeDaatiou. After the firat, ahe strikea ; and the family, for which the man in chief part married, reat3 on a wretched little creature who ia handed over to nurseß from his birth, and who when older, and if presentable, ia done up in blue velvet and exhibited as a show, while given strong wine and sugar-plums aa hia share of such family life aa may be about. This is the only tax which the fashionable wife will pay' to maternity; and even this she thinks too much. The fashionable wife, following after Jezebel, thinks that paint and dyes make a woman more beautiful than nature and cleanliness possibly can. She is au adept of personal adornment, and knojA the latest chemical discoveries in rel_fl|n_ to the hair and skin, fche shadows under the eyes, and the rosy touches that tell so well in artful places. But to her hua- » band who sometimes sees her before she is made up, her artificial beauty is loath- . some, and he wonders afc the bliud insanity of those who find it attractive. She ridicules his remonstrances, when she does not treat them as impertinences, and tells him jauntily that if he does not like her as she ia, he can leave her alone. She will never seek him, he may be sure. And she keeps her word : or, if she breaks it, ifc is only when her funds have run shorfc and he last diamond is io the hands of the jeweller who has charged her a round sum for his paste, as per centage op her necessities. The fashionable wife looks on her husband's money as spoil — something which he wants to guard, and she seize. It is no joint property which it is as much her interest as it is hia to save .and use wisely ; but an enemy's possesaion which ifc will be her gain to loot. Aa for companionship — tovgours perarix pails, and an evening spent wifch her husband alone counts aa thsne plus ultra of deadly dulness.' Personal love for him haa died out, if even ifc once existed under the guise of passion because of novelty; and whatever she may. be .to others, her husband finds her uniformly cold aud repellant. Motherhood ia her bugbear ; children unwelcome intruders; and there is no more miserable woman extant, than the fashionable wife with a baby, thafc hinders her from joining in the season's vulgar pleasures. Essentially selfish and shallow, love haa little meaning for her as the doctrine of duty or the', glory .of -[sacrifice ; and those who know, her stand aside in a kind of wonder at the scheme of creatiou which includes, among ifcs offsets, a being withoufc uses and wifchout virtues — a woman wifch presumably a soul like any other, absolutely destitute of .the love which saves the world from worse than death — of the reality which seeks truth and lives in it — of all nobleness of aspiration, and all righteousness of life — of a woman whose god is pleasure, and her one aole rel'gion — fashion.