This species of small talk can only exist between the opposite sexes. Between women, small talk becomes silly or it runs to confidences. In the one case it is soon exhausted, in the other it is vulgarly supposed to be eternal; and the amount of smothered grief, of heart-rending woe, of poignant anguish, of amorous doubts, of Sphynx-like mysteries, of secret grief which cannot be whispered even to her pillow, which one young woman will confide to four hundred other young women, is only equalled by the rapidity with which the latter will dispossess themselves of _les confidences_ and the fertile imagination which will clothe them entirely new even before they are divulged for the second time. Between men, small talk is simply idiotic. You pass an evening with Serafina, and you get only simpers and syllabubs. She will not give you the ghost of a thought, although her tongue has been running like a mill-clapper for two mortal hours. She will run the whole gamut of talk, and you shall never once get a taste of the amber wine beneath the foam. _Per contra_, in an evening with Blanche, she will dive like a humming bird into every flower, sweet or bitter, beautiful or ugly, and extract honey from each. She does not linger long on anything. She does not go too deep to be tiresome, and yet you are aware that she would lead you a terrible chase into the real if you gave the word. With that infinite tact which no one but a clever woman possesses, she will draw you out and give you cues for conversation without your ever dreaming of it. If you have a hobby, she will quietly saddle it and help you to mount, and spur it up to a rattling pace with little ingenuous confessions of ignorance, and implied flatteries which show you at once your superiority over the rest of mankind; and she will take you off your hobby and turn him out to grass so gracefully that you will be thoroughly satisfied with your ride. She will read you a charming little homily on her gold cross, which "Jews might kiss or infidels adore," and she will lead you with that narrow edge of lace around her pretty throat, which a rude breath might dissipate, through meadows of talk, where every flower is "a thing of beauty" and "a joy forever." But to effectually do this, she must have no hobbies, and she must assume an ignorance if she have it not. Ignorance is one of the strongest weapons in the female armory, and if the small talk assumes the form of an argument, a graceful yielding, especially if one is obstinate, is also politic. January 18, 1868. _FLAT ON THE BACK._ I write to you to-day with a sugar-coated pill and a small bottle of suspicious-looking fluid, which Æsculapius has designated with the cabalistic abbreviations "_Aq. Cret. Rhu. Pulv. 2 jiii_," between myself and the delirious chaos of fever.