ENGLISH LADIES ABROAD.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume XIII, Issue 1025, 11 May 1869, Page 2

ENGLISH LADIES ABROAD.

[from the daily news.] Bad news is told for English ladies. Continental salous and ball rooms are rapidly being closed against them. English people are no longer to be invited to Continental receptions because English ladies dress so shabbily that they spoil the room ! Now it is quite true that a good many £ ‘ English ” go abroad to retrench, and that retrenchment usually implies, among other matters of cheeseparing, economy in attire. But it is equally true that many of these, in deserting their country for the most conclusive of reasons, by no means intend to abdicate their social importance. They aspire to maintain it under more favourable conditions. They aim at moving in a society into whose English equivalent they would never have dreamed of being admitted. One of the consequences perhaps occasionally is that they do not altogether adorn it. Many of our countrymen and countrywomen, too, who ought to know better, entertain ridiculously mistaken notions of the sumptuary ideas and standards current among themselves and foreigners respectively. Hence English costumes on the Boulevards which would never be ventured on by their wearers in Piccadilly, and nondescript attire at the Grand Opera that would cause their owners to be turned away from the door at Covent Garden. But what is the nature of that particular Continental society to which English women are no longer to be invited because they dress so shabbily that they spoil the room ? It is not the settled society of large and well-to-do capitals, that boast their own festive aristocracy and hereditary heads of fashion. The fashionable circles from which our countrywomen are henceforward to be excluded are themselves foreign and migratory. They are, in fact, chiefly Russian and American, No one can have extensively explored the Continent of Europe during the last few years without observing that it is infested by a horde of semi-civi-lised money-bags from the North Pole and the Setting Sun, whose only notion of entertaining consists in “ pilling up the agnoy ” of powder, gilt, and every imaginary species of gingerbread extravagance, till the suites of apartments they inhabit can bear and hold no more.