to be fashionable at the time; and love no more enters into their calculations than it does into those of the women I first spoke of. They wield another kind of power. It is better suited to them, and better worth having--for them. In a vague, formless way everybody knows this. Some day it will be formulated and written about, and reduced to a system; and by that time fresh developments will be in the air. But sometimes one even of that order of women forgets herself, and somebody teaches her that she has a heart, and it runs away with her, and then----’ ‘And then, there is the devil to pay,’ observed Signor Giuseppe, who had not lived for five years in England without picking up some terse native expressions, which he used often with singular point and correctness. ‘Exactly,’ replied Fulvia with a light, hard laugh, as she shrugged her shoulders. ‘It is because she is weak, then. She does not by nature belong to that order. The sooner that fact is proved, and she is relegated from it to another for which she is more suited, the better for her and everyone else.’ ‘I think your doctrine a hard one, and a heartless one,’ said Minna, ever more and more constrainedly. ‘But--exactly!’ exclaimed Fulvia almost impatiently. ‘Have I not just been saying that heart is for one set of people only? There are others who are happier and better off without taking it into account. Surely it is better that they should know this, and should get the best out of their lives that is to be extracted from them, rather than spend their time in struggling after some impossible ideal, and dying discontented and misunderstood?’ Minna shook her head as she rang the bell for tea to be brought in. There was something wrong, fallacious and unreal about it, though it tripped glibly from Fulvia’s clever tongue. The most painful thing about it, to her, was that she could not make out whether Fulvia spoke in jest or earnest, for effect, or from a fully convinced heart. ‘Does your husband take any interest in all this?’ she asked suddenly.