She has her counterpart to-day. She lays down the law, with a steely glance through her pince-nez, scattering words like “fundamental” with the self-satisfied air of one distributing sugar-plums to not very deserving children. She will stultify the very best of critics by quoting his most foolish passages as oracles, and contrive, where she admires the right things, to do so for the wrong reasons. The hazy dabbler is quite as bad, and quite as irritating. She vibrates like Memnon’s harp to any breath from higher planes, and mistakes the sympathetic vibrations of her empty head for the sounding of some organ note of the infinite. Like the shallowest pond she may sometimes produce the illusion of reflecting the profundity of the heavens, till a closer examination reveals the mud and the tin kettles such a very little way below the surface. The good Englishwoman is neither of these: she has either too great a simplicity or too well developed a sense of humour, for she hates pretence and is not slow to perceive it in others. So distrustful is she of artifice that she seldom shines in the fine rapier-play of witty conversation: her interchange of ideas may be compared rather to the game of lawn tennis, with plenty of movement and hard-hitting in it, most balls being returned from the base line with a well-timed drive, not snappily volleyed at the net. She is most attractive when a flush of emotion colours her thinking, showing thus as an effective foil to her mankind who think unemotionally or wear the mask of indifference to conceal their sensitiveness. She understands this shyness in Englishmen and overcomes it so delicately by her sympathy that they glow in her society as the Dolomite peaks in the sunset. She does this, if she takes any trouble at all, with a natural simplicity, not with the elaborate study that Balzac’s Princesse de Cadignan exercised to fascinate her D’Arthez.