go
to the ends of the earth on the scent of big game; but you shirk all
social exertion with a cynical laziness. You will come from Damascus at
a stretch without sleeping, and think nothing of it; but you find it a
wretched thing to have to exert yourself to be courteous in a
drawing-room.

Therefore the _demi-monde_ suits you with a curious fitness, and suits
you more and more every year. I am afraid it is not very good for you. I
don't mean for your morals; I don't care the least about them, I am a
dog of the world; I mean for your manners. It makes you slangy, inert,
rude, lazy. And yet what perfect gentlemen you can be still, and what
grace there is in your careless, weary ease, when you choose to be
courteous; and you always _do_ choose, that I must say for you, when you
find a woman who is really worth the trouble.

* * *

I never knew quite whether I liked her--how can you with those women of
the world? She was kind and insincere; she was gentle and she was cruel;
she was generous and ungenerous; she was true as steel, and she was
false as Judas--what would you?--she was a woman of the world, with
several sweet natural impulses, and all a coquette's diplomacies.

She tended me with the greatest solicitude one day that autumn, when I
had run a thorn into my foot: and the very next day, when I was well
again, she laughed to see me worried on the lawn by a bull-terrier. If
you have not met a woman like that, I wonder where you have lived.

* * *

You must be spider or fly, as somebody says. Now all my experience tells
me that men are mostly the big, good-natured, careless blue-bottles,
half-drunk with their honey of pleasure, and rushing blindly into any
web that dazzles them a little in the sunshine; and women are the
dainty, painted, patient spiders that just sit and weave, and weave, and
weave, till--pong!--Bluebottle is in head foremost, and is killed, and
sucked dry, and eaten up at leisure.

You men think women do not know much of life. Pooh! I, Puck, who have
dwelt for many of my days on their boudoir cushions, and eaten of their
dainty little dinners, and been smuggled under their robes even into
operas, balls, and churches, tell you that is an utter fallacy. They do
not choose you to know that they know it, very probably; but there is
nothing that is hidden from them, I promise you.

* * *

Don't you know that whilst broad, intellectual sc