Experiences, reminiscences, episodes, picked up as only women know how to pick them up from other women's lives,--or other women's destinies, as they prefer to call them,--and told as only women know how to relate them; what God has done or is doing with some other woman whom they have known--that is what interests women once embarked on their own lives,--the embarkation takes place at marriage, or after the marriageable time,--or, rather, that is what interests the women who sit of summer nights on balconies. For in those long-moon countries life is open and accessible, and romances seem to be furnished real and gratis, in order to save, in a languor-breeding climate, the ennui of reading and writing books. Each woman has a different way of picking up and relating her stories, as each one selects different pieces, and has a personal way of playing them on the piano. Each story _is_ different, or appears so to her; each has some unique and peculiar pathos in it. And so she dramatizes and inflects it, trying to make the point visible to her apparent also to her hearers. Sometimes the pathos and interest to the hearers lie only in this--that the relater has observed it, and gathered it, and finds it worth telling. For do we not gather what we have not, and is not our own lacking our one motive? It may be so, for it often appears so. And if a child inside be wakeful and precocious it is not dreams alone that take on reflections from the balcony outside: through the half-open shutters the still, quiet eyes look across the dim forms on the balcony to the star-spangled or the moon-brightened heavens beyond; while memory makes stores for the future, and germs are sown, out of which the slow, clambering vine of thought issues, one day, to decorate or hide, as it may be, the structures or ruins of life. A DRAMA OF THREE It was a regular dramatic performance every first of the month in the little cottage of the old General and Madame B----. It began with the waking up of the General by his wife, standing at the bedside with a cup of black coffee. "Hé! Ah! Oh, Honorine! Yes; the first of the month, and affairs--affairs to be transacted." On those mornings when affairs were to be transacted there was not much leisure for the household; and it was Honorine who constituted the household. Not the old dressing-gown and slippers, the old, old trousers, and the antediluvian neck-foulard of other days! Far from it. It was a case of warm water (with even a fling of cologne in it), of the trimming of beard and mustache by Honorine, and the black broadcloth suit, and the brown satin stock, and that _je ne sais quoi de dégagé_ which no one could possess or assume like the old General. Whether he possessed or assumed it is an uncertainty which hung over the fine manners of all the gentlemen of his day, who were kept through their youth in Paris to cultivate _bon ton_ and an education.