led certain women to cultivate their minds as they would a new style of dressing their hair. All that we used to satirize in former entertainments of this kind fails to exist in those I am describing. Pipe-stem curls and blue spectacles are replaced by the most Parisian felicities of costume. A delightful-looking creature in a Worth dress that fits her like a glove will give us her 'views' on the Irish land-question or the persecution of the Jews in Russia.... And now I come to the real object of my digression, as the long-winded orators say. Cornelia Van Horn frowns upon all this. She has gathered about her a little faction, too, which frowns obediently in her defense. You must not fancy for a moment that Cornelia could not shine in these assemblies if she chose to favor them. She has brains enough to _out_shine nearly all their supporters. But she condemns the intellectual tendency in women when thus openly exhibited. If they want to read and think, they should do it in the quiet of their closets, and in the same way that they write their letters, or glance over their accounts, or distribute their household orders. There is no objection to philosophy, science, belles-lettres, so long as these are not made to interfere with the general dignified commonplace of the higher social life. To be individual, argumentative, reformatory, is to be professional. To be professional is not to be 'good form.' The moment that a drawing-room is made to resemble a lecture-room or a seminary it becomes odious from a patrician stand-point. Only queens and duchesses can afford to paint pictures or to write books, without loss of caste. A consistent aristocracy never discovers new ideas; it accepts old ones. Agitators are the enemies of repose, and repose is the soul of refinement." Here Mrs. Diggs gave a gleeful trill of laughter that made Claire compare it to her mind as well as her person; it was so clear and sharp. "Oh, you can't imagine," she went on, "how radical Cornelia is in her positively feudal conservatisms. I'm so liberal, don't you know, that I can appreciate her narrowness. I relish it as one does a delicious joke. But it's a very curious sort of bigotry. There's nothing in the least spontaneous about it. I've a conviction that she sweeps her eye more widely over this fine Nineteenth Century than any of the ladies I've been telling you about. She has seen that she can only reign on one kind of a throne, and she sticks there. And I assure you, there isn't the least doubt that she reigns in good earnest.... I'm surprised that Beverley Thurston didn't tell you about her. Beverley has got her measure so exactly. He thinks me dreadful, as I said, but he's fond of me. I'm sure we always amuse each other."