"Look around and through this room, and you will understand one part of my meaning. Do you remark the preponderance of married over single belles? and that the most tenderly deferential cavaliers are husbands, and not dancing with their wives? I could point out to you three men, leaders of the ton in this extremely reputable, eminently moral assembly, who, it is whispered among the knowing ones, are married, and, having left their domestic associations for a season of recreation, boldly attach themselves to certain stylish young ladies here, and challenge observation, defy public censure, by their marked and increasing devotion. I meet them strolling along the beach in the morning; riding together in the afternoon; and when not engaged in this evening exhibition of toilet and muscle, you will find them pacing the moon or star-lit piazza, or, perchance, again sentimentalizing on the shore until the witching hour draws near." "You surprise me!" "You have no right to be surprised. You have the same thing continually before you in your city. Every fashionable hotel or boarding-house can supply you with such flirtations by the dozen. A married woman who declines the polite services of all gentlemen, except her husband and near relatives, is a prude, with false scruples of propriety and delicacy. Let her legal partner complain--he is cried out upon as a despot, and you can trust the sweet angel of an abused wife to elude his vigilance--violence, she terms it--for the future, without altering her conduct in aught else. Do you see that pretty woman in blue--the one with the madonna-like face? Her tyrant is here but once a week--from Saturday until Monday--then hies back to the business he loves as well as she does her pleasure. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and the forenoon of Saturday, any mustachioed puppy may walk, talk, drive, and flirt with her--bask in the rays of those liquid orbs. When the rightful lord appears, she is demure as a nun, patient as a saint, dutiful as Griselda, to him and him alone. Do you begin to understand why I congratulated you upon having a husband of the olden stamp? Why, I do from my heart felicitate my friend Hammond upon having gained, as a helpmeet, one of that nearly obsolete species--Woman!"