great love-stories of the world.

Elements such as these sway the Morals of the Renaissance.

But I am taking Mrs. McMurray too seriously; and it is really not a bad
idea to have Carlotta taught type-writing.

CHAPTER V

May 26th.

This morning a letter from Judith.

"Do not laugh at me," she writes. "The road to Paris is paved with good
intentions. I really could not help it. Delphine put her great arm round
my would-be sequestered and meditative self and carried it off bodily,
and here it is in the midst of lunches, picture-shows, dinners, suppers,
theatres and dances; and if you laugh, you will make me humiliated when
I confess that it is thoroughly enjoying itself."

Laugh at her, dear woman? I am only too glad that she can fling her
Winter Garment of Repentance into the Fires of Paris Springtide. She has
little enough enjoyment in friendless London. Fill your heart with it,
my dear, and lay up a store for use in the dull months to come. For my
part, however, I am content to be beyond the reach of Delphine's great
arm. I must write to Judith. I shall have to explain Carlotta; but for
that I think I shall wait until she becomes a little more explicable.
In dealing with women it is well to employ discrimination. You are never
quite sure whether they are not merely simple geese or the most complex
of created beings. Perhaps they are such a curious admixture that you
cannot tell at a given moment which side, the simple or the complex,
you are touching. May not there be the deepest of all allegories in Eve
standing midway between the innocent apple and the guileful serpent? I
shall have to see more of Carlotta before I can safely explain her to
Judith.

At any rate she is no longer attired like an odalisque of the Second
Empire, and Mrs. McMurray has saved her from the lamentable errors of
taste shown by the female mountebank of sixteenth century France. My
excellent friend safely delivered up an exhausted and bewildered charge
at half-past seven last evening, assuring me that her task had been
easy, and that her anticipations of it being the day of her life
had been fulfilled. It had been like dressing a doll, she explained,
beaming.

An edifying pastime for an adult woman! I did not utter this sentiment,
for she would rightly have styled me the most ungrateful of unhung
wretches.

Carlotta, then, had followed her about like a perambulatory doll,
upon which she had fitted all the finery she could