Its origin and growth have arisen out of the complexities of modern society.
In fiction Milady and Madame Marneffe come in for first honors--in each the leopard crossed on the serpent and united under a petticoat, beautiful and wicked--but since the Balzac and Dumas days the story-tellers and stage-mongers have made exceeding free with the type, and we have between Herman Merivale's Stephanie de Mohrivart and Victorien Sardou's Zica a very theater--or shall we say a charnel house--of the woman with the past; usually portrayed as the victim of circumstance; unprincipled through cruel experience; insensible through lack of conscience; sexless in soul, but a siren in seductive arts; cold as ice; hard as iron; implacable as the grave, pursuing her ends with force of will, intellectual audacity and elegance of manner, yet, beneath this brilliant depravity, capable of self-pity, yielding anon in moments of depression to a sudden gleam of human tenderness and a certain regret for the innocence she has lost.
Such a one is sometimes, though seldom, met in real life.

But many pretenders may be encountered at Monte Carlo and other European resorts.
They range from the Parisian cocotte, signalized by her chic apparel, to the fashionable divorcee who in trying her luck at the tables keeps a sharp lookout for the elderly gent with the wad, often fooled by the enterprising sport who has been there before.
These are out and out professional adventuresses.

There are other adventuresses, however, than those of the story and the stage, the casino and the cabaret.

The woman with the past becomes the girl with the future.
Curiously enough this latter is mainly, almost exclusively, recruited from our countrywomen, who to an abnormal passion for foreign titles join surpassing ignorance of foreign society.

Thus she is ready to the hand of the Continental fortune seeker masquerading as a nobleman--occasionally but not often the black sheep of some noble family--carrying not a bona fide but a courtesy title--the count and the no-account, the lord and the Lord knows who! The Yankee girl with a _dot_ had become before the world war a regular quarry for impecunious aristocrats and clever crooks, the matrimonial results tragic in their frequency and squalor.
Another curious circumstance is the readiness with which the American newspaper tumbles to these frauds.