ol and a promise. The costly toys of fashion lie about, but not so
as to suggest a museum or a curiosity shop. You will find her sitting by
the fire in a low chair, from which she will not rise to greet you.
Her talk will not now be what it was at the ball; there she was our
creditor; in her own home she owes you the pleasure of her wit. These
are the shades of which the lady is a marvelous mistress. What she
likes in you is a man to swell her circle, an object for the cares
and attentions which such women are now happy to bestow. Therefore, to
attract you to her drawing-room, she will be bewitchingly charming. This
especially is where you feel how isolated women are nowadays, and
why they want a little world of their own, to which they may seem a
constellation. Conversation is impossible without generalities."

"Yes," said de Marsay, "you have truly hit the fault of our age.
The epigram--a volume in a word--no longer strikes, as it did in the
eighteenth century, at persons or at things, but at squalid events, and
it dies in a day."

"Hence," said Blondet, "the intelligence of the lady, if she has any,
consists in casting doubts on everything. Here lies the great difference
between two women; the townswoman is certainly virtuous; the lady
does not know yet whether she is, or whether she always will be; she
hesitates and struggles where the other refuses point-blank and falls
full length. This hesitancy in everything is one of the last graces left
to her by our horrible times. She rarely goes to church, but she will
talk to you of religion; and if you have the good taste to affect
Free-thought, she will try to convert you, for you will have opened
the way for the stereotyped phrases, the head-shaking and gestures
understood by all these women: 'For shame! I thought you had too much
sense to attack religion. Society is tottering, and you deprive it
of its support. Why, religion at this moment means you and me; it is
property, and the future of our children! Ah! let us not be selfish!
Individualism is the disease of the age, and religion is the only
remedy; it unites families which your laws put asunder,' and so forth.
Then she plunges into some neo-Christian speech sprinkled with political
notions which is neither Catholic nor Protestant--but moral? Oh! deuced
moral!--in which you may recognize a fag end of every material woven by
modern doctrines, at loggerheads together."

The women could not help laughing at the airs