day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and as Ste. Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments and tinged the eyelids and the hands."
Mes amies, we have often read and studied this marvelous passage together, and now I can only say to you that it is true! But every bit of culture means so much more to me than it ever did before and now that I know what European life is, I can understand why they are more cultured than we are. It is because they have leisure. Here the working classes expect to work, as our American working class does not. And the material cares are just taken right off the shoulders of the upper classes. We are expected to occupy ourselves with higher things. I am reading, reading, reading as never before, and getting a closer knowledge of French literature, even than our studies together gave me. It all means so much more to me, now that I am right among the very people who are described in it. Think of looking up from a volume of Zola, and having a caller come in, who might be a character right out of the book. I often tell Mr. Allen, that the life around me illustrates and explains the literature, and the literature illustrates and explains the life. It is a wonderful, wonderful experience!
I have just finished De Maupassant's "Notre Cœur," and I am not surprised that we found it impossible to get hold of the French edition in America. Our strait-laced, old-fashioned. Puritanic America doesn't know enough to appreciate such a picture of this free European world, where relations between men and women are different from those between high school boys and girls. At home the girls rule the roost, if you will excuse a vulgar expression. But not here. Here they are put off in a corner, till they get a husband, and then they are allowed to blossom out. A woman of my age, so a French gentleman told me the other day, is considered just at the right age for being fascinating. And he assured me he didn't say that because it might apply to me, but because it is so. The men
