(_By Mr. Punch's Own Type-Writer._)
No. IV.--THE GIDDY SOCIETY LADY.
[Illustration]
The Giddy Lady is one who, having been plunged at an early age into
smart society, is whirled perpetually round in a vortex of pleasures and
excitements. In the effort to keep her head above water, she is as
likely as not to lose it. This condition she naturally describes as
"being in the swim." In the unceasing struggle to maintain herself
there, she may perhaps shorten her life, but she will apparently find a
compensation in the increased length of her dressmaker's bills. She is
ordinarily the daughter of aristocratic parents, who carefully allowed
her to run wild from the moment she could run at all. By their example
she has been taught to hold as articles of her very limited faith, that
the serious concerns of life are of interest only to fools, and should,
therefore (though the inference is not obvious), be entirely neglected
by herself, and that frivolity and fashion are the twin deities before
whom every self-respecting woman must bow down.
Having left the Seminary at which she acquired an elementary ignorance
of spelling, a smattering of French phrases as used by English lady
novelists, and a taste for music which leads her in after-life to prefer
Miss BESSIE BELLWOOD to BEETHOVEN, she is soon afterwards brought out at
a smart dance in London. From this point her progress is rapid. Balls
and concerts, luncheons and receptions, dinners and theatres, race
meetings and cricket matches, at both of which more attention is paid to
fashion than to the field, follow one another in a dizzy succession. She
has naturally no time for thought, but in order to avoid the least
suspicion of it, she learns to chatter the slang of the youthful
Guardsmen and others who are her companions. A certain flashing style of
beauty ensures to her the devotion of numerous admirers, to whom she
babbles of "chappies" and "Johnnies," and "real jam" and "stony broke,"
and "two to one bar one," as if her life depended upon the correct
pronunciation of as many of these phrases as possible in the shortest
time on record. She thus comes to be considered a cheerful companion,
and at the end of her third season, marries a jaded man of pleasure,
whose wealth is more considerable than his personal attractions, and
who, for some inscrutable reason, has been approved by her parents as a
suitable husband.
She treats matrimony as an emancipation from rules which she has rarely
seen any one else observe, and has never honoured herself, and after a
few years, she becomes one of that gaudy band of Society ladies who
follow with respectful imitation the giddy vagaries of the Corinthians
of a lower grade. She dines often without her husband at smart
restaurants, where she has constant opportunities of studying the
manners of her models. She adores the burlesques at the Gaiety and the
Avenue, and talks, with a complete absence of reserve and a disregard of
pedantic accuracy, about the lives and adventures of the actresses who
figure there. She can tell you, and does, who presented LOTTIE A. with a
diamond star, and who was present at the last supper-party in honour of
TOTTIE B. Nor is she averse to being seen and talked about in a box at a
Music-Hall, or at one of the pleasure-palaces in Leicester Square. She
allows the young men who cluster round her to suppose that she knows all
about their lapses from strict propriety, and that she commends rather
than condemns them. _Causes célèbres_ are to her a staple of
conversation, her interest in them varying directly as the number of
co-respondents.
It is impossible, therefore, that the men who are her friends should
treat her with that chivalrous respect which an obsolete tradition would
seem to require, but they suffer no loss of her esteem in consequence.
Such being her behaviour in the society of men, the tone of her daily
conversation with friends of her own sex may be readily imagined, though
it might not be pleasant to describe. Suffice it to say, that she sees
no shame in addressing them, or in allowing herself to be addressed by a
name which a Court of law has held to be libellous when applied to a
burlesque actress. She is always at Hurlingham or the Ranelagh, and has
seen pigeons killed without a qualm. She never misses a Sandown or a
Kempton meeting; she dazzles the eyes of the throng at Ascot every year,
and never fails at Goodwood.
Twice a year the Giddy Lady is compelled by the traditions of her caste
to visit Paris, in order to replenish her exhausted wardrobe. On these
occasions she patronises only the best hotel, and the most expensive and
celebrated of men-dressmakers, and she is "fitted" by a son of the
house, of whom she talks constantly and familiarly by his Christian name
as JEAN, or PIERRE, or PHILIPPE. During the shooting season she goes
from country-house to country-house. She has been seen sometimes with a
gun in her hands, often with a lighted cigarette between her lips.
Indeed she is too frequent a visitor at shooting-luncheons and in
smoking-rooms, where a woman, however much she may attempt to disguise
her sex, is never cordially welcomed by men. The conventions of the
society in which she moves seem to require that she should be attended
during her visits by a _cavaliere servente_, who is therefore always
invited with her. Their pastime is to imitate a flirtation, and to
burlesque love, but neither of them is ever deceived into attributing
the least reality to this occupation, which is often as harmless as it
is always absurd.
These and similar occupations, of course, leave her no time to attend to
her children, who are left to grow up as best they may under the
fostering care of nursery-maids and of such relations as may choose,
from time to time, to burden themselves with the olive-branches of
others. Her husband has long since retired from all competition with
her, and leaves her free to follow her own devices, whilst he himself
follows the odds. She is often supposed to be riding for a fall. It is
certain that her pace is fast. Yet, though many whisper, it is quite
possible that she will ride to the end without open damage.
Of her dress and her jewels it need only be said that she affects
tailor-made costumes and cat's-eye bangles by day, and that at night she
escapes by the skin of her teeth from that censure which the scantiness
of her coverings would seem to warrant, and which Mr. HORSLEY, R.A., if
he saw her, would be certain to pronounce.
In middle age she loses her brilliant complexion. Yet, for reasons best
known to herself, her colour continues to be bright, though her spirits
and her temper seem to suffer in the effort to keep it so. As old age
advances, she is as likely as not to become a gorgon of immaculate
propriety, and will be heard lamenting over the laxity of manners which
permits girls to do what was never dreamt of when she was a girl
herself.
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