FINE LADIES.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VIII, Issue 50, 12 December 1891, Page 677

FINE LADIES.

There are ladies and ladies—ladies who are gentlewomen, and ladies who are fine ladies ; and the terms are not convertible. On the contrary, it seems to me that they are quite opposed to each other, and that, as the true gentlewoman is never the fine lady, so is the fine lady never the true gentlewoman. Fine-ladyism is a disease of long and steady growth, but of specially rapid development in these later days. There never was a time—save perhaps during the reign of the Fourteenth Louis anil onward to the French Revolution —when women made it so confessedly a point of pride to be absolutely useless to themselves and their generation as they do now—never a time when the highest test of ladyhood was the lowest mark of womanhood. Indeed, just in proportion to the spread of the new doctrine called the Dignity of Labour has been the fine lady’s abhorrence of the very mildest forms of practical usefulness ; and in exact ratio with the advocacy of the theory of emancipation has been the proof of her unfitness for its practice. Fine-ladyism ignores both work and duties. A fine lady is one who imagines herself to be born into this great, suffering, toiling world of ours for her own pleasure only ; and in nowise for more than this. W hat relations she holds with her fellowman or woman she holds for herself, not for him—still less for her ; for such good and advantage as she may be able to draw out of the association, but in no sense whatever for any good that she can bestow.