ll always turn by choice your ear
instead of mine."

* * *

Women never like one another, except now and then an old woman and a
young woman like you and me. They are good to one another amongst the
poor, you say! Oh, that I don't know anything about. They may be.
Barbarians always retain the savage virtues. In Society women hate one
another--all the more because in Society they have to smile in each
other's faces every night of their lives. Only think what that is, my
dear!--to grudge each other's conquests, to grudge each other's
diamonds, to study each other's dress, to watch each other's wrinkles,
to outshine each other always on every possible occasion, big or little,
and yet always to be obliged to give pet names to each other, and visit
each other with elaborate ceremonial--why, women _must_ hate each other!
Society makes them. Your poor folks, I daresay, in the midst of their
toiling and moiling, and scrubbing and scraping, and starving and
begging, do do each other kindly turns, and put bread in each other's
mouths now and then, because they can scratch each other's eyes out, and
call each other hussies in the streets, any minute they like, in the
most open manner. But in Society women's entire life is a struggle for
precedence, precedence in everything--beauty, money, rank, success,
dress, everything. We have to smother hate under smiles, and envy under
compliment, and while we are dying to say "You hussy," like the women
in the streets, we are obliged, instead of boxing her ears, to kiss her
on both cheeks, and cry, "Oh, my dearest--how charming of you--so kind!"
Only think what all that repression means. You laugh? Oh, you very
clever people always do laugh at these things. But you must study
Society, or suffer from it, sooner or later. If you don't always strive
to go out before everybody, life will end in everybody going out before
you, everybody--down to the shoeblack!

* * *

"Read!" echoed the old wise man with scorn. "O child, what use is that?
Read!--the inland dweller reads of the sea, and thinks he knows it, and
believes it to be as a magnified duck-pond, and no more. Can he tell
anything of the light and the shade; of the wave and the foam; of the
green that is near, of the blue that is far; of the opaline changes, now
pure as a dove's throat, now warm as a flame; of the great purple depths
and the fierce blinding storm; and the delight and the fear, and th