child every virtue in the world but that of justice or generosity toward outsiders. For the French _ménagère_, the outsider is the enemy. Indeed, for all the French family the outsider is a reptile to be crushed. Let a wealthy Frenchwoman take a strong fancy to an outsider, and the hostility awakened in the breast of every member against this inoffensive outsider will be found to be a sentiment to which only Balzac could do justice. Sons and daughters, cousins, nephews, and nieces, will combine to slight or insult the reprobate. In the case of a widower, or an unmarried uncle, marriage is the terror; in the case of the wealthy woman I suspect the last will and testament arouses the scare. Anyway, whatever the unexpressed sentiment may be, the French family of all classes joins in this unreasonable hatred, suspicion, and jealousy of the outsider. I remember when I first came to Paris many years ago, having a letter of introduction to Madame Blaze de Bury, a very singular and clever old lady, who said to me: “You will find the French as hard as a granite wall when you come to knock against them. To the superficial glance they are so easy, so accessible, so pleasant. Well, I have lived long enough among them to discover that they are just like the Chinese. They hate foreigners, even when they are delightful to them. And this hatred of the foreigner is shown in family life, where the foreigner is everyone who is not a direct relation.” Subsequent experience did not prove Madame Blaze de Bury altogether right as regards the foreigner, for I, a foreigner, have found in France kindness, sympathy, generosity, and affection, and all from the French of the very French. In criticising Frenchwomen, I am criticising the part of humanity I like best, appreciate and admire most on earth. Give Frenchwomen the freedom, the liberal education of England, a dash of Protestantism—that is, mental and moral independence—and you will have womanhood in its perfection. They have little of the snob, they are naturally simple and unpretentious, and they are competent, intelligent, and discreet. The two features that most strike the foreigner in French home-life are the careful economy practised everywhere, in city and country, among the poor and the rich, and the pretty courtesies and tendernesses which help to keep the wheels of domestic machinery so admirably oiled. The notion that relationship is merely the privilege of making one’s self as disagreeable as possible, and indulging in cruelties of speech and action, does not exist in France, or exists in a very diminished degree.