That is to say, the chivalric ideal is best preserved in those existing communities which are substantially least modern.
Survivals of this lackadaisical or romantic ideal occur freely in the tastes of the well-to-do classes of Continental countries.
In modern communities which have reached the higher levels of industrial development, the upper leisure class has accumulated so great a mass of wealth as to place its women above all imputation of vulgarly productive labor. Here the status of women as vicarious consumers is beginning to lose its place in the sections of the body of the people; and as a consequence the ideal of feminine beauty is beginning to change back again from the infirmly delicate, translucent, and hazardously slender, to a woman of the archaic type that does not disown her hands and feet, nor, indeed, the other gross material facts of her person.