the pleasure of her wit. These are the shades of which the lady is a
marvelous mistress. What she likes in you is a man to swell her
circle, an object for the cares and attentions which such women are
now happy to bestow. Therefore, to attract you to her drawing-room,
she will be bewitchingly charming. This especially is where you feel
how isolated women are nowadays, and why they want a little world of
their own, to which they may seem a constellation. Conversation is
impossible without generalities."

"Yes," said de Marsay, "you have truly hit the fault of our age. The
epigram--a volume in a word--no longer strikes, as it did in the
eighteenth century, at persons or at things, but at squalid events,
and it dies in a day."

"Hence," said Blondet, "the intelligence of the lady, if she has any,
consists in casting doubts on everything. Here lies the great
difference between two women; the townswoman is certainly virtuous;
the lady does not know yet whether she is, or whether she always will
be; she hesitates and struggles where the other refuses point-blank
and falls full length. This hesitancy in everything is one of the last
graces left to her by our horrible times. She rarely goes to church,
but she will talk to you of religion; and if you have the good taste
to affect Free-thought, she will try to convert you, for you will have
opened the way for the stereotyped phrases, the head-shaking and
gestures understood by all these women: 'For shame! I thought you had
too much sense to attack religion. Society is tottering, and you
deprive it of its support. Why, religion at this moment means you and
me; it is property, and the future of our children! Ah! let us not be
selfish! Individualism is the disease of the age, and religion is the
only remedy; it unites families which your laws put asunder,' and so