iage. That, they said with much conviction, was always the case in
America, and a girl was thought all the more of who had done so.

Jacqueline, however, thought more than was reasonable about the dangers
that the friend of her childhood was going to encounter through her
fault. Fred's departure would have lent him a certain prestige, had
not a powerful new interest stepped in to divert her thoughts. Madame
d'Avrigny was getting up her annual private theatricals, and wanted
Jacqueline to take the principal part in the play, saying that she ought
to put her lessons in elocution to some use. The piece chosen was to
illustrate a proverb, and was entirely new. It was as unexceptionable
as it was amusing; the most severe critic could have found no fault with
its morality or with its moral, which turned on the eagerness displayed
by young girls nowadays to obtain diplomas. Scylla and Charybdis was
its name. Its story was that of a young bride, who, thinking to please
a husband, a stupid and ignorant man, was trying to obtain in secret a
high place in the examination at the Sorbonne--'un brevet superieur'.
The husband, disquieted by the mystery, is at first suspicious, then
jealous, and then is overwhelmed with humiliation when he discovers that
his wife knows more of everything than himself. He ends by imploring her
to give up her higher education if she wishes to please him. The little
play had all the modern loveliness and grace which Octave Feuillet alone
can give, and it contained a lesson from which any one might profit;
which was by no means always the case with Madame d'Avrigny's plays,
which too often were full of risky allusions, of critical situations,
and the like; likely, in short, to "sail too close to the wind," as Fred
had once described them. But Madame d'Avrigny's prime object was the
amusement of society, and society finds pleasure in things which,
if innocence understood them, would put her to the blush. This play,
however, was an exception. There had been very little to cut out this
time. Madame de Nailles had been asked to take the mother's part, but
she declined, not caring to act such a character in a house where years
before in all her glory she had made a sensation as a young coquette. So
Madame d'Avrigny had to take the part herself, not sorry to be able
to superintend everything on the stage, and to prompt Dolly, if
necessary--Dolly, who had but four words to say, which she always
forgot, but who loo