ssion enters
it, and then art grows restless and troubled as the deep sea at the call
of the whirlwind.

_WANDA._

A man cast forth from his home is like a ship cut loose from its anchor
and rudderless. Whatever may have been his weakness, his offences, they
cannot absolve you from your duty to watch over your husband's soul, to
be his first and most faithful friend, to stand between him and his
temptations and perils. That is the nobler side of marriage. When the
light of love is faded, and its joys are over, its duties and its
mercies remain. Because one of the twain has failed in these the other
is not acquitted of obligation.

* * *

"Choose some career; make yourself some aim in life; do not fold your
talents in a napkin; in a napkin that lies on the supper-table at
Bignon's. That idle, aimless life is very attractive, I daresay, in its
way, but it must grow wearisome and unsatisfactory as years roll on. The
men of my house have never been content with it; they have always been
soldiers, statesmen, something or other beside mere nobles."

"But they have had a great position."

"Men make their own position; they cannot make a name (at least, not to
my thinking). You have that good fortune; you have a great name; you
only need, pardon me, to make your manner of life worthy of it."

"Cannot make a name? Surely in these days the beggar rides on horseback
in all the ministries and half the nobilities;"

"You mean that Hans, Pierre, or Richard becomes a count, an excellency,
or an earl? What does that change? It alters the handle; it does not
alter the saucepan. No one can be ennobled. Blood is blood; nobility can
only be inherited; it cannot be conferred by all the heralds in the
world. The very meaning and essence of nobility are descent, inherited
traditions, instincts, habits, and memories--all that is meant by
_noblesse oblige_."

* * *

"Men are always like Horace," said the princess. "They admire rural
life, but they remain for all that with Augustus."

* * *

I read the other day of some actresses dining off a truffled pheasant
and a sack of bonbons. That is the sort of dinner we make all the year
round, morally--metaphorically--how do you say it? It makes us thirsty,
and perhaps--I am not sure--perhaps it leaves us half starved, though we
nibble the sweetmeats, and don't know it.

"Your dinner must lack two things--bread and water.