"When I had lived through several scenes of the character just described, I could not help thinking that we Athenians were perhaps much wiser than the modern men, in that we did not allow our women to appear in society. They were, it is true, seldom interesting, nor physically greatly developed. On the other hand they never bored us with types of what these little ones call society ladies. I cannot but remember the exquisite evenings which I spent at the house of Critias, where one of our wittiest _hetairai_, or emancipated women, imitated the false manners, hypocrisy and inane pomp of the society ladies of Thebes in Egypt. We laughed until we could see no longer. What Leontion, that _hetaira_, represented was exactly what I observed in my lady friend in London. The same disheartening dryness of soul; the same exasperating superficiality of intellect; the same lack of all real refinement, that I found a few centuries later in society in the times of the Roman Cæsars. "London desiccates; whereas Athens or Paris animates. When I gave up my relation to Entréa, I met a woman of about thirty-four, whose head was so perfect that Evænetus himself has never engraved a more absolutely beautiful one. Her hair was not only golden of the most lovely tint, but also full of waves, from long curls in Doric _adagio_, to tantalising Corinthian _pizzicato_ frizzles all round. Her face was a cameo cut in onyx, and both lovely and severe. Her loveliness was in the upper part of her face; her severity round the mouth and the chin. This strange reversal of what is usually the case gave her a character of her own. Her stark blue eyes were big and cold, yet sympathetic and intelligent-looking; and her ears were the finest shells that Leucothea presented her mother with from the wine-coloured ocean, and inside the shells were the most enchanting pearls, which the sea-nymph then left in the mouth of the blessed babe as her teeth. She was not tall, but very neatly made; a _fausse maigre_. She wrote bright articles, in which from time to time she wrapped up a big truth in _bon-bon_ paper. "There was in her the richest material for the most enchanting womanhood; a blend of Musarion and Aspasia; or to talk modern style, a blend of Mademoiselle l'Espinasse with Madame Récamier. She was neither. Not that she made any preposterous effort to be, what Paris calls, a Madame Récamier. But London desiccated her. From dry by nature, she became drier still by London. Being as dry as she was, she only cared for mystic things; for what is behind the curtain of things; for the borderland of knowledge and dream. As sand can never drink in enough rain, so dry souls want to intoxicate themselves with mystic alcohol. In vulgarly dry persons that rain from above becomes--mud; in refinedly dry souls it is atomised into an intellectual spray. Her whole soul was athirst of that spray.