independence—and you will have womanhood in its perfection. They have little of the snob, they are naturally simple and unpretentious, and they are competent, intelligent, and discreet.
The two features that most strike the foreigner in French home-life are the careful economy practised everywhere, in city and country, among the poor and the rich, and the pretty courtesies and tendernesses which help to keep the wheels of domestic machinery so admirably oiled. The notion that relationship is merely the privilege of making one's self as disagreeable as possible, and indulging in cruelties of speech and action, does not exist in France, or exists in a very diminished degree.
A study of the economies practised in aristocratic and prosperous bourgeois circles in France leads us to strange facts. Taine quotes an incident in his Carnets de Voyage that happened in the neighbourhood of Poitiers. A Parisian was hunting by invitation on a friend's lands, and, without knowing it, crossed the border-land of those of a certain viscountess. He was not shooting, but carried his gun under his arm; he had lost his way. Up came a keeper and stopped him. The Parisian explained the circumstances, and insisted that he was not shooting. His host and he decided to visit the viscountess personally, and put the case before her in order to avoid unjust proceedings. They
