ous watch over the goings-out and
comings-in of every one in the vicinity, said to him, "How very gay
your wife is, Mr. Benson! she has been walking with a different
gentleman every day since you were gone.' 'Dear me!' says Carl; 'a
different man every day! How glad I am! If you had told me she was
walking with the _same_ man every day I might have been a little
scared.' But a woman may be perfectly chaste herself, and yet cause a
great deal of unchasteness in other people. Here is this Mrs. Harrison,
smoking cigarettes--and cigars, too, sometimes, in the open air;
drinking grog at night, and sometimes in the morning; letting Tom
Edwards and the foolish boys who imitate him talk slang to her without
putting them down; always ready for a walk or drive with the last
handsome young man who has arrived; and utterly ignoring her husband,
except when she makes some slighting mention of him for not sending her
money enough: what is the effect of all this upon the men? The
foreigners; there are plenty of them here every season; I wonder there
are so few this time: instead of one decent Frenchman like Le Roi, you
usually find half-a-dozen disreputable ones; Englishmen many, not always
of the best sort; Germans, Russians, and Spaniards, occasionally: they
all are inclined to look upon her--especially considering her
belligerent attitude towards the rest of the female population--as
something _tres legere_, and to attempt to go a little too far with her.
Then she puts them down fast enough, and they in spite say things about
her, the discredit of which extends to our ladies generally--in short,
she exposes the country before foreigners. Then for the natives, she
catches some poor boy just loose upon the world, dances with, flatters
him--for she has a knack of flattering people without seeming to do so,
especially by always appearing to take an interest in what is said to
her,--keeps him dangling about her for a while; then some day he says or
does something to make a fool of himself, and she extinguishes him. The
man gets a check of this sort at his entry into society that is enough
to make him a misogynist for life. And the little scenes that she used
to get up last summer with married men, just to make their wives
jealous!"

"Which, I suppose, is the reason none of your wives will let you speak
to her?" said Ashburner, who began to feel, he hardly knew why, a
sentiment of partisanship for Mrs. Harrison. "But granting that her
f