It does not much signify that the reality is a shrewd, calculating, unromantic woman, with a hard face and keen eyes, who for the most part makes a good practical wife to her common-sense middle-aged husband, who thinks more of her social position than of her feelings, more of her children than of her lovers, more of her purse than of her heart, and whose great object of life is a daily struggle for centimes. It pleases the French to idealize their eminently practical and worldly-wise women into this queer compound of hysterics and adultery; and if it pleases them it need not displease us. To the German his ideal is of two kinds--one, his Martha, the domestic broad-faced _Hausmutter_, who cooks good dinners at small cost, and mends the family linen as religiously as if this were the Eleventh Commandment specially appointed for feminine fingers to keep, the poetic culmination of whom is Charlotte cutting bread and butter; the other, his Mary, his Bettina, full of mind and æsthetics and heart-uplifting love, yearning after the infinite with holes in her stockings and her shoes down at heel. For what are coarse material mendings to the æsthetic soul yearning after the Infinite and worshipping at the feet of the prophet? In Italy the ideal woman of late times was the ardent patriot, full of active energy, of physical force, of dauntless courage. In Poland it is the patriot too, but of a more refined and etherealized type, passively resenting Tartar tyranny by the subtlest feminine scorn, and living in perpetual music and mourning. In Spain it is a woman beautiful and impassioned, with the slight drawback of needing a world of looking after, of which the men are undeniably capable. In Mohammedan countries generally it is a comely smooth-skinned Dudù, patient and submissive, always in good humour with her master, economical in house-living to please the meanness, and gorgeous in occasional attire to gratify the ostentation, of the genuine Oriental; but by no means Dudù ever asleep and unoccupied. For, if not allowed to take part in active outside life, the Eastern's wife or wives have their home duties and their maternal cares like all other women, and find to their cost that, if they unduly neglect them, they will have a bad time of it with Ali Ben Hassan when the question comes of piastres and sequins, and the dogs of Jews who demand payment, and the pigs of Christians who follow suit.