Conversation is
impossible without generalities."
"Yes," said de Marsay, "you have truly hit the fault of our age. The
epigram--a volume in a word--no longer strikes, as it did in the
eighteenth century, at persons or at things, but at squalid events,
and it dies in a day."
"Hence," said Blondet, "the intelligence of the lady, if she has any,
consists in casting doubts on everything. Here lies the great
difference between two women; the townswoman is certainly virtuous;
the lady does not know yet whether she is, or whether she always will
be; she hesitates and struggles where the other refuses point-blank
and falls full length. This hesitancy in everything is one of the last
graces left to her by our horrible times. She rarely goes to church,
but she will talk to you of religion; and if you have the good taste
to affect Free-thought, she will try to convert you, for you will have
opened the way for the stereotyped phrases, the head-shaking and
gestures understood by all these women: 'For shame! I thought you had
too much sense to attack religion. Society is tottering, and you
deprive it of its support.
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