Let it not torment the few who know what must have been the grounds
of this exclamation, if I explain it to those who do not.

In London a shopkeeper and a shopkeeper's wife seem to be one bone
and one flesh: in the several endowments of mind and body,
sometimes the one, sometimes the other has it, so as, in general,
to be upon a par, and totally with each other as nearly as man and
wife need to do.

In Paris, there are scarce two orders of beings more different:
for the legislative and executive powers of the shop not resting in
the husband, he seldom comes there: --in some dark and dismal room
behind, he sits commerce-less, in his thrum nightcap, the same
rough son of Nature that Nature left him.

The genius of a people, where nothing but the monarchy is salique,
having ceded this department, with sundry others, totally to the
women,--by a continual higgling with customers of all ranks and
sizes from morning to night, like so many rough pebbles shook long
together in a bag, by amicable collisions they have worn down their
asperities and sharp angles, and not only become round and smooth,
but will receive, some of them, a polish like a brilliant: --
Monsieur le Mari is little better than the stone under your foot.

- Surely,--surely, man! it is not good for thee to sit alone: --
thou wast made for social intercourse and gentle greetings; and
this improvement of our natures from it I appeal to as my evidence.

- And how does it beat, Monsieur? said she.--With all the