pure
hypothesis] Adolph certainly is not one of them.

This occurrence may help you to understand that correspondence is a
double-edged weapon which is of as much advantage for the defence of
the husband as for the inconsistency of the wife. You should therefore
encourage correspondence for the same reason that the prefect of police
takes special care that the street lamps of Paris are kept lighted.

3. OF SPIES.

To come so low as to beg servants to reveal secrets to you, and to fall
lower still by paying for a revelation, is not a crime; it is perhaps
not even a dastardly act, but it is certainly a piece of folly; for
nothing will ever guarantee to you the honesty of a servant who betrays
her mistress, and you can never feel certain whether she is operating
in your interest or in that of your wife. This point therefore may be
looked upon as beyond controversy.

Nature, that good and tender parent, has set round about the mother of
a family the most reliable and the most sagacious of spies, the most
truthful and at the same time the most discreet in the world. They
are silent and yet they speak, they see everything and appear to see
nothing.

One day I met a friend of mine on the boulevard. He invited me to
dinner, and we went to his house. Dinner had been already served, and
the mistress of the house was helping her two daughters to plates of
soup.

"I see here my first symptoms," I said to myself.

We sat down. The first word of the husband, who spoke without thinking,
and for the sake of talking, was the question:

"Has any one been here to-day?"

"Not a soul," replied his wife, without lifting her eyes.

I shall never forget the quickness with which the two daughters looked
up to their mother. The elder girl, aged eight, had something especially
peculiar in her glance. There was at the same time revelation and
mystery, curiosity and silence, astonishment and apathy in that look.
If there was anything that could be compared to the speed with which the
light of candor flashed from their eyes, it was the prudent reserve with
which both of them closed down, like shutters, the folds of their white
eyelids.

Ye sweet and charming creatures, who from the age of nine even to the
age of marriage too often are the torment of a mother even when she is
not a coquette, is it by the privilege of your years or the instinct of
your nature that your young ears catch the faint sound of a