Billiards for Women in Favor

When winter’s snows promise to make hazards too hazardous for indulgence in golf playing, the old and interesting game of billiards will amuse the house-bound. Now the occasional woman has played billiards, for many years, and played it well; but it was not until Lord Dunraven’s pretty daughter, Lady Aileen Wyndham-Quin, came over this year, to see her father race his handsome yacht, that billiards came suddenly into great social favor. Lady Aileen, it appears, used her cue not only with uncommon facility, but proved how exceedingly graceful a slender woman can appear when in evening dress she pockets her balls or smashes her opponent’s most careful combinations. The English girl’s exhibitions of prowess not only set her feminine friends in America seriously thinking, but valorously practicing on the baize-covered tables, until the majority of even callow debutants know something more than how to prettily chalk their cues. After many of the smartest autumn dinners the women quickly wandered down, from coffee, small talk, and satin-hung drawing-room, to the big leather-upholstered basement billiard-room, where the men found them, pink of cheek and bright of eye, over a game of sufficient strength to command even masculine respect and a desire to engage therein.–Demorest Magazine.