Modern

Waikato Times, Volume 108, Issue 18165, 1 November 1930, Page 14 (Supplement)

Modern

She had power, she mattered, and that was her unsought reward in the performance of her duties. . . And she is now as extinct as the great copper butterfly. Mr B. P. Benson thus sums up the “great lady" of the ’eighties and ’nineties in his volume of Victorian reminiscences. In his description of her he refers to the things she did not do:— Lfp-Stloklng In Publlo. Autumns in- London, lip-sticking In public, wkinters on the' Riviera, the kippering of her arms and legs, bosom and back, on the sands of the Lido, and inability to remain in one place for more than a week, were not habits of the great lady. Above all, she was ■ possessed of that queer old quality called dignity. Indeed it is far easier to get near .the definition of her by excluding of what she hvas not than by the inclusion of what she was. She was not in a hazing hurry all the time, she did not run a hat-shop or sit in the House of Commons, she had no push, because there was nowhere to push to, for, as regards position, she was there already by birth or marriage or both, and the craving that everyone should know how much she wds there could not exist in her, for nobody could doubt it. . She did not want to be advertised or her doings daily to be mirrored.To give a dinner at an hotel and take her party to a dance club afterwards would have seemed to the great lady a most extraordinary proceeding. She was not concerned with making a position for hersef by enticing notable folk to her house, for the position was hers already, and she did her social duty by it. Vanished Power. With the disappearance of such women there vanished every nucleus of social power, the very idea of which to-day is an antediluvian notion. “Society” has so broadened out that, becoming quite flat in the process, there is, not the semblance of a peak. left. ■ - ' . -■ To suggest that anybody matters now or wields any social power would imply as complete a misunderstanding' of modern conditions as woud the i failure to grasp the fact that in the j ’eighties and ’nineties there were in i. Mr Benson quotes Lady Dorothy Nevill: i