There is really very little necessity for this kind of _morgue_ in France, as the French are not pushing, and care very little about distinguishing themselves by having fine acquaintances. It might be more necessary in England, where people are proud to know a lord, yet in England I have not observed that extreme difference between the sexes which certainly exists in France. I should say that in England, as a rule, a man and his wife, in whatever rank, will either repel you or accept you together. You would hardly, in England, be on terms of affectionate friendship with a man, and on terms of the most formal and distant acquaintanceship with his wife--acquaintanceship remaining equally formal, equally distant, for an unlimited number of years. [Sidenote: Distance does not diminish.] [Sidenote: The Dislike to what is “Unfeminine.”] [Sidenote: Essentially French.] [Sidenote: Education of French Girls.] [Sidenote: Further Separation of Men and Women.] This distance between the sexes does not diminish in provincial France. I am not speaking of the great cities like Lyons and Marseilles, which may have something of Parisian openness and ease, but of the country and especially of the aristocratic parts of it. I should say that if there is any perceptible change it is rather towards a still wider separation of the sexes. The French have a very keen sense, perhaps an exaggerated sense, of what is feminine and what is unfeminine. Englishmen of the last generation were French in their feelings about this; they would have considered it unfeminine for a woman to make political speeches, to deliver sermons, to be a leader in the Salvation Army, and to press for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts. They would even have thought it unfeminine to want a grand classical and mathematical education. All that feeling of objection to the “unfeminine” is essentially French, and it remains in France whilst in England it is passing away. I remember talking to some French people about George Eliot’s extensive education. It did not exalt her in their eyes, but the contrary; they thought it unfeminine. There is a partial reaction against this opinion in France, of which one symptom is the establishment of _lycées_ for girls; but it is only one party, and but a section of that party, which advocates this, and the real object is not so much to educate girls as to deliver them from clerical domination. All the tendencies of modern amusements and occupations separate men and women in France. As examples I may mention the increase of smoking and gambling, and the decline of conversation and dancing. The increase of smoking has the effect of leaving men together after dinner “to smoke a cigarette.” In former times they went to the drawing-room with the ladies, and looked upon the English as boors for doing otherwise. Now, under pretext of a cigarette, Frenchmen will remain away from ladies almost the whole evening. The increase