arms folded like those of Mademoiselle Georges, and you will see
before you the Consul's wife, with a boy of six, as handsome as a
mother's desire, and a little girl of four on her knees, as beautiful
as the type of childhood so laboriously sought out by the sculptor
David to grace a tomb.

This beautiful family was the object of Camille's secret study. It
struck Mademoiselle des Touches that the Consul looked rather too
absent-minded for a perfectly happy man.

Although, throughout the day, the husband and wife had offered her the
pleasing spectacle of complete happiness, Camille wondered why one of
the most superior men she had ever met, and whom she had seen too in
Paris drawing-rooms, remained as Consul-General at Genoa when he
possessed a fortune of a hundred odd thousand francs a year. But, at
the same time, she had discerned, by many of the little nothings which
women perceive with the intelligence of the Arab sage in _Zadig_, that
the husband was faithfully devoted. These two handsome creatures would
no doubt love each other without a misunderstanding till the end of
their days. So Camille said to herself alternately, "What is wrong?
--Nothing is wrong," following the misleading symptoms of the Consul's
demeanor; and he, it may be said, had the absolute calmness of
Englishmen, of savages, of Orientals, and of consummate diplomatists.

In discussing literature, they spoke of the perennial stock-in-trade
of the republic of letters--woman's sin. And they presently found
themselves confronted by two opinions: When a woman sins, is the man
or the woman to blame? The three women present--the Ambassadress, the
Consul's wife, and Mademoiselle des Touches, women, of course, of
blameless reputations--were without pity for the woman. The men tried