never for the social extravagances, for prattle, or for beloved dress;
but always for her jealousy, and for the repulsive person of the man upon
whom she spies and in whom she vindicates her ignoble rights. If this is
the shopkeeper the possession of whom is her boast, what then is she?

This great immorality, centring in the irreproachable days of the
Exhibition of 1851, or thereabouts--the pleasure in this particular form
of human disgrace--has passed, leaving one trace only: the habit by which
some men reproach a silly woman through her sex, whereas a silly man is
not reproached through his sex. But the vulgarity of which I have
written here was distinctively English--the most English thing that
England had in days when she bragged of many another--and it was not able
to survive an increased commerce of manners and letters with France. It
was the chief immorality destroyed by French fiction.