Bad coin is known from good by the ring of it, and so is bad enthusiasm. Let the coiner be ever so clever at his art, in the coining of enthusiasm the sound of true gold can never be imparted to the false metal; and I doubt whether the cleverest she in the world can make false enthusiasm palatable to the taste of man; to the taste of any woman the enthusiasm of another woman is never very palatable. We understood at Rome that Mrs. Talboys had a considerable family,--four or five children, we were told,--but she brought with her only one daughter, a little girl about twelve years of age. She had torn herself asunder, as she told me, from the younger nurslings of her heart, and had left them to the care of a devoted female attendant, whose love was all but maternal. And then she said a word or two about the general in terms which made me almost think that this quasi-maternal love extended itself beyond the children. The idea, however, was a mistaken one, arising from the strength of her language, to which I was then unaccustomed. I have since become aware that nothing can be more decorous than old Mrs. Upton, the excellent head nurse at Hardover Lodge; and no gentleman more discreet in his conduct than General Talboys. And I may as well here declare also that there could be no more virtuous woman than the general’s wife. Her marriage vow was to her paramount to all other vows and bonds whatever. The general’s honour was quite safe when he sent her off to Rome by herself, and he no doubt knew that it was so. _Illi robur et oes triplex_, of which I believe no weapons of any assailant could get the better. But nevertheless we used to fancy that she had no repugnance to impropriety in other women--to what the world generally calls impropriety. Invincibly attached herself to the marriage tie, she would constantly speak of it as by no means necessarily binding on others; and virtuous herself as any griffin of propriety, she constantly patronised, at any rate, the theory of infidelity in her neighbours. She was very eager in denouncing the prejudices of the English world, declaring that she found existence among them to be no longer possible for herself. She was hot against the stern unforgiveness of British matrons, and equally eager in reprobating the stiff conventionalities of a religion in which she said that none of its votaries had faith, though they all allowed themselves to be enslaved.