forth. Then she plunges into some neo-Christian speech sprinkled with
political notions which is neither Catholic nor Protestant--but moral?
Oh! deuced moral!--in which you may recognize a fag end of every
material woven by modern doctrines, at loggerheads together."

The women could not help laughing at the airs by which Blondet
illustrated his satire.

"This explanation, dear Count Adam," said Blondet, turning to the
Pole, "will have proved to you that the 'perfect lady' represents the
intellectual no less than the political muddle, just as she is
surrounded by the showy and not very lasting products of an industry
which is always aiming at destroying its work in order to replace it
by something else. When you leave her you say to yourself: She
certainly has superior ideas! And you believe it all the more because
she will have sounded your heart with a delicate touch, and have asked
you your secrets; she affects ignorance, to learn everything; there
are some things she never knows, not even when she knows them. You
alone will be uneasy, you will know nothing of the state of her heart.
The great ladies of old flaunted their love-affairs, with newspapers
and advertisements; in these days the lady has her little passion
neatly ruled like a sheet of music with its crotchets and quavers and
minims, its rests, its pauses, its sharps to sign the key. A mere weak
women, she is anxious not to compromise her love, or her husband, or
the future of her children. Name, position, and fortune are no longer
flags so respected as to protect all kinds of merchandise on board.
The whole aristocracy no longer advances in a body to screen the lady.
She has not, like the great lady of the past, the demeanor of lofty
antagonism; she can crush nothing under foot, it is she who would be
crushed. Thus she is apt at Jesuitical _mezzo termine_, she is a