"You see how beautifully your father puts it, Eliza; but he never abuses
people. That is a habit in which, I am sorry to say, you indulge too
freely. You show no good feeling to anybody who differs from you in
opinion, and you talk as if Frenchmen had no religion, no principles,
and no humanity. And what do you know about them, pray? Have you ever
spoken to a Frenchman? Have you ever even seen one? Would you know one
if you even set eyes upon him?"

"Well, I am not at all sure that I should," the young lady replied,
being thoroughly truthful; "and I have no wish for the opportunity. But
I have seen a French woman, mother; and that is quite enough for me. If
they are so, what must the men be?"

"There is a name for this process of feminine reasoning, this cumulative
and syncopetic process of the mind, entirely feminine (but regarded by
itself as rational), a name which I used to know well in the days when I
had the ten Fallacies at my fingers' ends, more tenaciously perhaps
than the Decalogue. Strange to say, the name is gone from my memory;
but--but--"

"But then you had better go after it, my dear," his wife suggested with
authority. "If your only impulse when you hear reason is to search after
hard names for it, you are safer outside of its sphere altogether."

"I am struck with the truth of that remark," observed the rector; "and
the more so because I descry a male member of our race approaching, with
a hat--at once the emblem and the crown of sound reason. Away with all
fallacies; it is Church-warden Cheeseman!"