middle of it.  There is Jemima, “who enjoys such delicate health “—­that is, she has no bust, and wears a scarf.  Then there is Grace, who is all for evening rambles, and the “Pilgrim of Love;” and Fanny, who can not help talking; and whom, in its turn, talking certainly cannot help.  They are remarkable for doing a little of everything at all times.  Whether it be designing on worsted or on bachelors—­whether concerting overtures musical or matrimonial; the same pretty development of the shoulder through that troublesome scarf—­the same hasty confusion in drawing it on again, and referring to the watch to see what time it is—­displays the mind ever intent on the great object of their career.  But they seldom marry (unless, in desperation, their cousins), for they despise the rank which they affect to have quitted—­and no man of sense ever loved a Tiptoe.  So they continue at home until the house is broken up; and then they retire in a galaxy to some provincial Belle Vue-terrace or Prospect-place; where they endeavour to forestall the bachelors with promiscuous orange-blossoms and maidenly susceptibilities.  We have characterised these heart-burning efforts after “station,” as originating with, and maintained by, the female branches of the family; and they are so—­but, nevertheless, their influence on the young men is no less destructive than certain.  It is a fact, that, the more restraint that is inflicted on these individuals in the gilded drawing-room at home, the more do they crave after the unshackled enjoyment of their animal vulgarity abroad.  Their principal characteristics are a love of large plaids, and a choice vocabulary of popular idiomatic forms of speech; and these will sufficiently define them in the saloons of the theatres and in the cigar divans.  But they are not ever thus.  By no means.  At home (which does not naturally indicate their own house), having donned their “other waistcoat” and their pin (emblematic of a blue hand grasping an egg, or of a butterfly poised on a wheel)—­pop! they are gentlemen.  With the hebdomadal sovereign straggling in the extreme verge of their pockets—­with the afternoon rebuke of the “principal,” or peradventure of some senior clerk, still echoing in their ears—­they are GENTLEMEN.  They are desired to be such by their mother and sisters, and so they talk about cool hundreds—­and the points of horses—­and (on the strength of the dramatic criticisms in the Satirist) of Grisi in Norma, and Persiani in La Sonnambula—­of Taglioni and Cerito—­of last season and the season before that.