"You don't mean, I take it, when you talk about 'those women,' that
Madame Blumenthal is not embalmed, for duration, in a certain infusion of
respectability?"

"Yes and no. The atmosphere that surrounds her is entirely of her own
making. There is no reason in her antecedents that people should drop
their voice when they speak of her. But some women are never at their
ease till they have given some damnable twist or other to their position
before the world. The attitude of upright virtue is unbecoming, like
sitting too straight in a fauteuil. Don't ask me for opinions, however;
content yourself with a few facts and with an anecdote. Madame
Blumenthal is Prussian, and very well born. I remember her mother, an
old Westphalian Grafin, with principles marshalled out like Frederick the
Great's grenadiers. She was poor, however, and her principles were an
insufficient dowry for Anastasia, who was married very young to a vicious
Jew, twice her own age. He was supposed to have money, but I am afraid
he had less than was nominated in the bond, or else that his pretty young
wife spent it very fast. She has been a widow these six or eight years,
and has lived, I imagine, in rather a hand-to-mouth fashion. I suppose
she is some six or eight and thirty years of age. In winter one hears of
her in Berlin, giving little suppers to the artistic rabble there; in
summer one often sees her across the green table at Ems and Wiesbaden.
She's very clever, and her cleverness has spoiled her. A year after her
marriage she published a novel, with her views on matrimony, in the
George Sand manner--beating the drum to Madame Sand's trumpet. No doubt
she was very unhappy; Blumenthal was an old beast. Since then she has
published a lot of literature--novels and poems and pamphlets on every
conceivable theme, from the conversion of Lola Montez to the Hegelian
philosophy. Her talk is much better than her writing. Her
_conjugophobia_--I can't call it by any other name--made people think