“La société crée la femme où la nature a fait une femelle.” This reflection comes from that great novelist, but not too profound philosopher, Balzac. It is sufficiently general to start many trains of thought, though it is not in itself a peculiarly valuable addition to sociological ideas. Yet Balzac’s own train of thought when he wrote it is clear enough. He was lingering with admiration over the figure of Diane de Maufrigneuse, Princesse de Cadignan, his incarnation of all the charm and the attraction of women. For him the opposition between the woman and the female was no idle one. In the latter he took no interest: she meant less to him than the hideous cowering creature with a baby at its breast which appeared behind that rutilant and terrifying primitive man on the cover of Mr Wells’ universal history, No. 2, means to us. But woman, as typified in Diane the supreme example, appeared to him as a work of art so amazingly perfected in every detail that one can almost describe him as kissing the tips of his fingers when he writes of her. He saw women as wonderful and beautiful refinements of raw nature, extraordinarily complicated, subtle beyond measure, no less alluring but more wily than the sirens, forming part of society, it is true, but in a remote way of their own, not as companions of the other half of humanity but as incalculable accidents of the simpler life of men. They were in his eyes divinities, witches or devils, but hardly ordinary human beings. Mrs Edith Wharton in her “French Ways and their Meaning” seems, in a less enthusiastic way, to adopt the same attitude towards French women. She boldly tells the American girl that she is but a child in the nursery compared with this daedal repository of feminine secrets, the French _femme du monde_. It is, in fact, the French point of view, which accounts for the power of women, or rather of the woman, in France and for the limitation of her activities to her own peculiar temples. She does not waste her virtues by wafting them at large over the dustier tracts of life, though it is possible that the _jeunes filles en fleur_, with their golf and tennis and boyish companionships, of whom M. Marcel Proust so engagingly writes, may come down from their pedestals more frequently than their mothers.