THE MAN TRAP.

Thames Star, Volume XII, Issue 4021, 17 November 1881, Page 2

THE MAN TRAP.

What a life she leads, this miserable rendor of womanhood for rank or pold! AIL through the season she,has baited her trap with every wile known to her, every glittering charm which she could conjure from art or nature. And what weary work it has been! If anything could make one forgive the iniquity of < this ~ hqman commerce, it .would be the weariness to flesh and blood that it brings. Each natural impulse subdued,. each human feeling crushed down, her face a mask, her voice an echo, her heart atrophied, her conscience in spiritual irons, her days spent in setting her trap, her nights in examining her take and ' its chances. What a life! No galley-slave's is more severe, no trickster's forger's, blackleg's, more dishonorable. And the season.comes and goes, and she is left still unbought. Her trap has been well baited, but no prey has been secured. Mabel and Maud, Hilda and Victoria have all been purchased in the marriage market, and she is left like a forlorn pledge unredeemed. Her milliner's bill is large; her "mother's resources are scanty; the younger sister must come out next season, for twenty, ripe and round, cannot be called callow seventeen for another year. And then where will she be P That unspoiled freshness will tell powerfully against her faded cbarms— charms touched up delicately and artistically granted, but always faded :. and always touched up. The chances of ultimate failure are multiplying against her and she is not in a position to chose. Bait with her strongest, bait with her boldest, the time is passing and she must secure her quarry now or never. She cares not who it may be, so long as it is some one whose 'name stands well at bis bankers. Let^it be the successful tradesman, with his half century on his shining pate, his defective breeding, his nouns and verbs in hopeless disagreement, his h's in unending pie, the roots of his family tree in a dung* hill, and he the first cotyledon of the growth, his insolent ostentation, his insufferable patronage of moneyless merit, and his more insufferable flunkeyism to all who can "give him a leg up;" his moral skin as tough as a rhinoceros's hide, his disbelief in all but himself and his success; let it be he in his most rampant vulgarity, and he is welcome to the girl who has at least the education and the bearing of a lady. Let it be the brutal young heir to an old name.or ,a fine estate—the man of thirty who has crowded the vicious experiences of a long lifetime into the nine years of bis majority.—Truth.