her, or until she leaves him. But this is not a point I need dwell on. In the matter of virtue, the Britishers make themselves out to be such honest, invulnerable fellows, unlike the chattering, bragging sinners on the other side of the Channel, that it is only the state of the public streets of Great Britain at nightfall that fronts us with the universal charge against them of Pharisaism. And so I come back to my contention, that since infidelity to the marriage vow does exist, the light-headed sons of France choose the more open way of sinning. Their view of the case, as expressed in their fiction, is frankly odious, and, on his own showing, there is something essentially unclean in the Frenchman's mind, though I have always found his conversation fastidiously correct and inoffensive, and it is sad to think of such a fine and splendid race of women playing the unsavoury rôle they are made to play by the dramatists and novelists of their land. The women, of course, must be greatly to blame for the misesteem expressed in their regard by their fashionable and popular writers. Too fearful of displeasing, and too sensitive to Gallic ridicule, they do not understand that it rests with them to claim and obtain the respect due to them. They applaud and admire the writers who most persistently degrade them under the flattering guise of a passionate interest and concern. They, who so
