One wonders what portion of her heart the amiable Mr. Philips was content to occupy.
Frenchwomen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries found their principal amusement in contracting, either with each other or with men, those highly sentimental friendships which were presumably free from all dross of earthly passion, and which rested on a shadowy basis of pure intellectual affinity. Mademoiselle de Scudéry delighted in portraying this rarefied intercourse between congenial souls, and the billing and cooing of Platonic turtle-doves fill many pages of her ponderous romances. Sappho and Phaon, in the Grand Cyrus, "told each other every particular of their lives," which must have been a little tedious at times and altogether unnecessary, inasmuch as we are assured that "the exchange of their thoughts was so sincere that all those in Sappho's mind passed into Phaon's, and all those in Phaon's came into Sappho's." Conversation under these circumstances would be apt to lose its zest for ordinary mortals, who value the power of speech rather as a disguise than as an interpretation of their real convictions; but it was not so
