cuits. Any one of the fashionable houses to which
ladies habitually resort without male protection, for a noonday lunch
when shopping,--may serve as a type of all the rest; and not one of them
but may be passed with a shudder, by husbands who wish their wives to
remain like Cesar's, not only chaste but above suspicion,--and by
fathers who do not desire the peach-bloom too early rubbed off from the
innocence of their fair daughters.

At this marble table, where the cloth is being so carefully spread by
the white-napkined waiter who has a steaming cluster of dishes on a
salver on the table opposite,--there may be a little party, like that of
our three friends, dropped in on the most proper of errands--that of
merely procuring a bit of lunch in the midst of a day of business,
without going home for it or visiting the table d'hote at a hotel; but
at the next table and the next there is something different. Here sit a
party of three giddy girls, without male protection, innocent enough in
their lives and intentions, but boldly exposing their faces to the rude
gaze of any of the libertine diners-out who may happen to be at the
tables opposite, and returning that gaze, when met, with a smile and a
simper that merely means scorn and self-confidence but may be easily
construed into a less creditable expression. And at this table, only two
removed, discussing a _pate de foix gras_ which may or may not have come
from Strasburg of the Big Goose Livers, and washing down his edibles
with a glass of liqueur that fires the blood like so much molten
lava,--sits a boldfaced man, fashionable in dress and perfumed in hair
and whiskers, whose gaze is that of the evil eye upon the reputation of
any woman, and who has no better occupation than lounging in any place
of public resort, to spy out the beauties of female face and figure and
the weaknesses in the fortifications that surround female virtue. And
here--at one of the opposite row of tables, her cup of coffee and plate
of French trifles in pasty just being set down before her--here is a
sadder spectacle than either. The wife of a wealthy merchant, yet young,
beautiful and attractive, but with a frightened look in her dark eye and
a nervous glancing round at the door every time it opens, which too well
reveals her story to the close observer. She is waiting for her
_lover_--harsh word in that connection, but the true and only one; her
lover, whose acquaintance she may have made through un