r advertise her liaisons as women of
vulgarity do. Nay, if her taste be perfect, though she have weaknesses,
I doubt if she will ever have vices. Vice will seem to her like a gaudy
colour, or too much gold braid, or very large plaits, or buttons as big
as saucers, or anything else such as vulgar women like. Fastidiousness,
at any rate, is very good _postiche_ for modesty: it is always decent,
it can never be coarse. Good taste, inherent and ingrained, natural and
cultivated, cannot alter. Principles--ouf!--they go on and off like a
slipper; but good taste is indestructible; it is a compass that never
errs. If your wife have it--well, it is possible she may be false to
you; she is human, she is feminine; but she will never make you
ridiculous, she will never compromise you, and she will not romp in a
cotillon till the morning sun shows the paint on her face washed away in
the rain of her perspiration. Virtue is, after all, as Mme. de Montespan
said, "une chose tout purement geographique." It varies with the
hemisphere like the human skin and the human hair; what is vile in one
latitude is harmless in another. No philosophic person can put any trust
in a thing which merely depends upon climate; but, Good Taste----

* * *

Gossip is like the poor devil in the legend of Fugger's Teufelspalast at
Trent; it toils till cock-crow picking up the widely-scattered grains of
corn by millions till the bushel measure is piled high; and lo!--the
five grains that are _the_ grains always escape its sight and roll away
and hide themselves. The poor devil, being a primitive creature,
shrieked and flew away in despair at his failure. Gossip hugs its false
measure and says loftily that the five real grains are of no consequence
whatever.

* * *

The Lady Hilda sighed. This dreadful age, which has produced communists,
petroleuses, and liberal thinkers, had communicated its vague
restlessness even to her; although she belonged to that higher region
where nobody ever thinks at all, and everybody is more or less devout in
seeming at any rate, because disbelief is vulgar, and religion is an
"affaire des moeurs," like decency, still the subtle philosophies and
sad negations which have always been afloat in the air since Voltaire
set them flying, had affected her slightly.

She was a true believer, just as she was a well-dressed woman, and had
her creeds just as she had her bath in the morning, as a matte