halibut for lunch; it is a solid fish and difficult to digest.

Perhaps, too, having no company but Jeanne and Torp, I am reduced to my
own aimless reflections.

Just as clothes exercise no influence on the majority of men, so their
emotional life is not much affected by circumstances. With us women it
is otherwise. We really _are_ different women according to the dresses
we wear. We assume a personality in accord with our costume. We laugh,
talk and act at the caprice of purely external circumstances.

Take for instance a woman who wants to confide in another. She will do
it in quite a different way in broad daylight in a drawing-room than in
her little "den" in the gloaming, even if in both cases she happens to
be quite alone with her confidante.

If some women are specially honoured as the recipients of many
confidences from their own sex, I am convinced they owe it more to
physical than moral qualities. As there are some rooms of which the
atmosphere is so cosey and inviting that we feel ourselves at home in
them without a word of welcome, so we find certain women who seem to be
endowed with such receptivity that they invite the confidences of
others.

The history of smiles has never yet been written, simply because the few
women capable of writing it would not betray their sex. As to men, they
are as ignorant on this point as on everything else which concerns
women--not excepting love.

I have conversed with many famous women's doctors, and have pretended to