weaknesses and fatal errors.

In this century, in which women have so much wider scope, when
they may paint, carve, act, sing, write, enter professional life,
or do whatever talent and inclination dictate, without loss of
dignity or prestige, unless they do it ill,--and perhaps even
this exception is a trifle superfluous,--it is difficult to
understand fully, or estimate correctly, a society in which the
best feminine intellect was centered upon the art of entertaining
and of wielding an indirect power through the minds of men.
These Frenchwomen had all the vanity that lies at the bottom of
the Gallic character, but when the triumphs of youth were over,
the only legitimate path to individual distinction was that of
social influence. This was attained through personal charm,
supplemented by more or less cleverness, or through the gift of
creating a society that cast about them an illusion of talent of
which they were often only the reflection. To these two classes
belong the queens of the salons. But the most famous of them
only carried to the point of genius a talent that was universal.

In its best estate a brilliant social life is essentially an
external one. Its charm lies largely in the superficial graces,
in the facile and winning manners, the ready tact, the quick
intelligence, the rare and perishable gifts of conversation--in
the nameless trifles which are elusive as shadows and potent as
light. It is the way of putting things that tells, rather than
the value of the things themselves. This world of draperies and
amenities, of dinners and conversaziones, of epigrams,
coquetries, and sparkling trivialities in the Frenchwoman's
milieu. It has little in common with the inner world that surges