yet patrician beauty, like the pretty aristocratic Charlotte
in Kaulbach's picture, who cuts the bread-and-butter, yet looks a
patrician. Pehl has nothing of the _belle petite_, like her sister of
Baden; nothing of the titled _cocadetta_, like her cousin of Monaco;
Pehl does not gamble or riot or conduct herself madly in any way; she is
a little old-fashioned still in a courtly way; she has a little
rusticity still in her elegant manners; she is like the noble dames of
the past ages, who were so high of rank and so proud of habit, yet were
not above the distilling-room and the spinning-wheel; who were quiet,
serious, sweet, and smelt of the rose-leaves with which they filled
their big jars.

* * *

The pity of modern Society is that all its habits make as effectual a
disguise morally as our domino in carnival does physically. Everybody
looks just like everybody else. Perhaps, as under the domino, so under
the appearance, there may be great nobility or great deformity; but all
look alike. Were Socrates amongst us, he would only look like a club
bore; and were there Messalina, she would only look--well--look much
like our Duchesse Jeunne!

* * *

She did not know that from these swamps of flattery, intrigue, envy,
rivalry, and emulation there rises a miasma which scarcely the
healthiest lungs can withstand. She did not know that though many may be
indifferent to the tempting of men, few indeed are impenetrable to the
smile and the sneer of women; that to live your own life in the midst of
the world is a harder thing than it was of old to withdraw to the
Thebaid; that to risk "looking strange" requires a courage perhaps
cooler and higher than the soldier's or the saint's; and that to stand
away from the contact and custom of your "set" is a harder and sterner
work than it was of old to go into the sanctuary of La Trappe or Port
Royal.

* * *

The world has grown apathetic and purblind. Critics rage and quarrel
before a canvas, but the nations do not care; quarries of marble are
hewn into various shapes, and the throngs gape before them and are
indifferent; writers are so many that their writings blend in the public
mind in a confused phantasmagoria, where the colours run into one
another, and the lines are all waved and indistinct; the singer alone
still keeps the old magic power, "The beauty that was Athens, once the
glory that was Rome's," still holds the