lesse oblige! our code still reads: 'Zeus has
unquestioned right to Io; but woe betide Io when she suns her heart in
the smiles that belong to Hera!' Some women find exhilaration in the
effort to excel, by flying closest to the flame without singeing their
satin wings; by executing a pirouette on the extremest ledge of the
abyss, yet escape toppling in; female Blondins skipping across the
tight rope of Platonic friendship, stretched above the unmentionable.
You are shocked?"

"Indeed, I am pained. I can scarcely recognize the Alma of old."

"Wait one moment, I have the floor. In the days when I wept for
my--shall I say 'bisc'? for impersonality is hedged about with safety,
and the consolation prize had not yet been invited to come back from
Coventry, a funny trifle set me to thinking seriously of my sin of
covetousness. One summer at a certain fashionable resort, let us call
it villeggiatura of the Lepidoptera, the amusement programme had
reached the last act, and people yawned for something new, when 'sweet
charity' came to the rescue, and proposed an entertainment to raise
funds for enlarging an ecclesiastical 'Columbary' where aged, unsightly
and repentant doves might moult, and renew their plumage. Musical,
dramatic, poetic recitations, and tableaux vivants constituted the
method of collecting the money, and the selections would have made
Rabelais chuckle. We had the most flagitiously erotic passages
(rendered in costume) from opera and opera bouffe, living reproductions
of the tragic pose of Paolo and Francesca that would hare inspired
Cabanel anew; of 'Ginevra Da Siena,' of 'Vivien,'--a carnival of the
carnal! where nurseries were robbed to supply the mimic ballet, and
where bald-headed clergyman, and white-haired mothers in Israel clapped
and encored. One fair forsaken dame, whose indignant spouse was seeking
a divorce, came to the footlights in an artistic garment so decollete
that a man sitting behind me whispered to his friend: 'What pictures
does she suggest to you? "Phryne before the Judges"--or Long's
"Thisbe?" She languorously waved a floral fan of crimson carnations,
and recited with all of Siddons' grace and Rachel's fire selections
from a book of poems, that were so many dynamite bombs of vice
smothered in roses. Amid tumultuous applause, she gave as encore
something that contained a fragment of Feydeau, and its closing words
woke up my drowsy soul, like a clap of thunder: 'Ce que les poetes
appellent