rsh discord and all unloveliness
are banished: where the rare beauty of high-born women is common; where
the passions at their wildest still sheathe themselves in courtesy's
silver scabbard; where the daily habits of existence are made graceful
and artistic; where grief, and woe, and feud, and futile longing for
lost loves, can easiest be forgot in delicate laughter and in endless
change. Artificial? Ah, well, it may be so! But since nevermore will you
return to the life of the savage, to the wigwam of the squaw, it is
best, methinks, that the Art of Living--the great _Savoir Vivre_--should
be brought, as you seek to bring all other arts, up to uttermost
perfection.

* * *

Men are very much in society as women will them to be. Let a woman's
society be composed of men gently born and bred, and if she find them
either coarse or stupid, make answer to her--"You must have been coarse
or stupid yourself."

And if she demur to the _tu quoque_ as to a base and illogical form of
argument, which we will grant that it usually is, remind her that the
cream of a pasturage may be pure and rich, but if it pass into the hands
of a clumsy farm serving-maid, then shall the cheese made thereof be
neither Roquefort nor Stilton, but rough and flavourless and uneatable,
"like a Banbury cheese, nothing but paring." Now, the influence of a
woman's intelligence on the male intellects about her is as the churn to
the cream: it can either enrich and utilise it, or impoverish and waste
it. It is not too much to say that it almost invariably, in the present
decadence of the salon and parrot-jabbering of the suffrage, has the
latter effect alone.

* * *

Humiliation is a guest that only comes to those who have made ready his
resting-place, and will give him a fair welcome. My father used to say
to me, "Child, when you grow to womanhood, whether you be rich or poor,
gentle or simple, as the balance of your life may turn for or against
you, remember always this one thing--that no one can disgrace you save
yourself. Dishonour is like the Aaron's Beard in the hedgerows, it can
only poison if it be plucked." They call the belladonna Aaron's Beard in
the country, you know; and it is true that the cattle, simple as they
are, are never harmed by it; just because, though it is always in their
path, they never stop and taste it. I think it may just be so with us;
with any sort of evil.

* * *