won't help your case to hear. They'll make you sad, and when you're sad
you'll grow plain, and when you're plain you'll grow bitter, and when
you're bitter you'll be peu aimable. I was brought up to think that a
woman's first duty is to be infinitely so, and the happiest women I've
known have been in fact those who performed this duty faithfully. As
you're not a Catholic I suppose you can't be a devote; and if you don't
take life as a fifty years' mass the only way to take it's as a game of
skill. Listen to this. Not to lose at the game of life you must--I don't
say cheat, but not be too sure your neighbour won't, and not be shocked
out of your self-possession if he does. Don't lose, my dear--I beseech
you don't lose. Be neither suspicious nor credulous, and if you find
your neighbour peeping don't cry out; only very politely wait your own
chance. I've had my revenge more than once in my day, but I really think
the sweetest I could take, en somme, against the past I've known, would
be to have your blest innocence profit by my experience."

This was rather bewildering advice, but Euphemia understood it too
little to be either edified or frightened. She sat listening to it very
much as she would have listened to the speeches of an old lady in a
comedy whose diction should strikingly correspond to the form of her
high-backed armchair and the fashion of her coif. Her indifference was
doubly dangerous, for Madame de Mauves spoke at the instance of coming
events, and her words were the result of a worry of scruples--scruples
in the light of which Euphemia was on the one hand too tender a victim
to be sacrificed to an ambition and the prosperity of her own house on
the other too precious a heritage to be sacrificed to an hesitation. The
prosperity in question had suffered repeated and grievous breaches and
the menaced institution been overmuch pervaded by that cold comfort in
which people are obliged to balance dinner-table allusions to feudal
ancestors against the absence of side-dishes; a state of things the