like nothing that was to be seen under the sun it was impossible to
prove by comparison that they were wrong. You can't compare birds
and fishes; you could only feel that, as Greville Fane's characters
had the fine plumage of the former species, human beings must be of
the latter.

It would have been droll if it had not been so exemplary to see her
tracing the loves of the duchesses beside the innocent cribs of her
children. The immoral and the maternal lived together in her
diligent days on the most comfortable terms, and she stopped curling
the mustaches of her Guardsmen to pat the heads of her babes. She
was haunted by solemn spinsters who came to tea from continental
pensions, and by unsophisticated Americans who told her she was just
loved in THEIR country. "I had rather be just paid there," she
usually replied; for this tribute of transatlantic opinion was the
only thing that galled her. The Americans went away thinking her
coarse; though as the author of so many beautiful love-stories she
was disappointing to most of these pilgrims, who had not expected to
find a shy, stout, ruddy lady in a cap like a crumbled pyramid. She
wrote about the affections and the impossibility of controlling them,
but she talked of the price of pension and the convenience of an
English chemist. She devoted much thought and many thousands of
francs to the education of her daughter, who spent three years at a
very superior school at Dresden, receiving wonderful instruction in
sciences, arts and tongues, and who, taking a different line from
Leolin, was to be brought up wholly as a femme du monde. The girl
was musical and philological; she made a specialty of languages and
learned enough about them to be inspired with a great contempt for
her mother's artless accents. Greville Fane's French and Italian
were droll; the imitative faculty had been denied her, and she had an