seemed to enjoy Miss Treherne's singing?" she said cordially enough as
she folded her hands in her lap.

"Yes, I thought it beautiful. Didn't you?"

"Pretty, most pretty; and admirable in technique and tone; but she has
too much feeling to be really artistic. She felt the thing, instead of
pretending to feel it--which makes all the difference. She belongs to
a race of delightful women, who never do any harm, whom everybody calls
good, and who are very severe on those who do not pretend to be good.
Still, all of that pleasant race will read their husband's letters and
smuggle. They have no civic virtues. Yet they would be shocked to bathe
on the beach without a machine, as American women do,--and they look for
a new fall of Jerusalem when one of their sex smokes a cigarette after
dinner. Now, I do not smoke cigarettes after dinner, so I can speak
freely. But, at the same time, I do not smuggle, and I do bathe on the
beach without a machine--when I am in a land where there are no sharks
and no taboo. If morally consumptive people were given a few years in
the South Seas, where they could not get away from nature, there would
be more strength and less scandal in society."

I laughed. "There is a frank note for Mr. Clovelly, who thinks he knows
the world and my sex thoroughly. He says as much in his books.--Have you
read his 'A Sweet Apocalypse'? He said more than as much to me. But he
knows a mere nothing about women--their amusing inconsistencies; their
infidelity in little things and fidelity in big things; their self-
torturings; their inability to comprehend themselves; their periods of
religious insanity; their occasional revolts against the restraints of
a woman's position, known only to themselves in their dark hours; ah,
really, Dr. Marmion, he is ignorant, I assure you. He has only got two