delicately, that such a figure as hers was not bred on rustic diet;
also, that the Parisian glaze had not failed of its effect on the
coarser provincial clay.

Meanwhile, below in the garden, her husband was meekly tying up his
rose-trees.

Neither of the landladies' husbands had figured in the street-battle.
It had been a purely Amazonian encounter, bloodless but bitter. Both
the husbands of these two belligerent landladies appeared singularly
well trained. Mouchard, indeed, occupied a comparatively humble sphere
in his wife's _menage_. He was perpetually to be seen in the court-yard,
at the back of the house, washing dogs, or dishes, in a costume in
which the greatest economy of cloth compatible with decency had been
triumphantly solved. His wife ran the house, and he ran the errands, an
arrangement which, apparently, worked greatly to the satisfaction of
both. But Mouchard was not the first or the second French husband who,
on the threshold of his connubial experience, had doubtless had his
role in life appointed to him, filling the same with patient
acquiescence to the very last of the lines.

There is something very touching in the subjection of French husbands.
In point of meekness they may well serve, I think, as models to their
kind. It is a meekness, however, which does not hint of humiliation;
for, after all, what humiliation can there be in being thoroughly
understood? The Frenchwoman, by virtue of centuries of activity, in the
world and in the field, has become an expert in the art of knowing her
man; she has not worked by his side, under the burn of the noon sun, or
in the cimmerian darkness of the shop-rear, counting the pennies, for
nothing. In exchanging her illusions for the bald front of fact, man