There is much of life passed on the balcony in a country where the
summer unrolls in six moon-lengths, and where the nights have to come
with a double endowment of vastness and splendor to compensate for the
tedious, sun-parched days.

And in that country the women love to sit and talk together of summer
nights, on balconies, in their vague, loose, white garments,--men
are not balcony sitters,--with their sleeping children within easy
hearing, the stars breaking the cool darkness, or the moon making a
show of light--oh, such a discreet show of light!--through the vines.
And the children inside, waking to go from one sleep into another,
hear the low, soft mother-voices on the balcony, talking about this
person and that, old times, old friends, old experiences; and it seems
to them, hovering a moment in wakefulness, that there is no end of the
world or time, or of the mother-knowledge; but, illimitable as it
is, the mother-voices and the mother-love and protection fill it
all,--with their mother's hand in theirs, children are not afraid even
of God,--and they drift into slumber again, their little dreams
taking all kinds of pretty reflections from the great unknown horizon
outside, as their fragile soap-bubbles take on reflections from the
sun and clouds.

Experiences, reminiscences, episodes, picked up as only women know how
to pick them up from other women's lives,--or other women's destinies,
as they prefer to call them,--and told as only women know how to
relate them; what God has done or is doing with some other woman whom
they have known--that is what interests women once embarked on their
own lives,--the embarkation takes place at marriage, or after the
marriageable time,--or, rather, that is what interests the women who
sit of summer nights on balconies. For in those long-moon countries