You
alone will be uneasy, you will know nothing of the state of her heart.
The great ladies of old flaunted their love-affairs, with newspapers
and advertisements; in these days the lady has her little passion
neatly ruled like a sheet of music with its crotchets and quavers and
minims, its rests, its pauses, its sharps to sign the key. A mere weak
women, she is anxious not to compromise her love, or her husband, or
the future of her children. Name, position, and fortune are no longer
flags so respected as to protect all kinds of merchandise on board.
The whole aristocracy no longer advances in a body to screen the lady.
She has not, like the great lady of the past, the demeanor of lofty
antagonism; she can crush nothing under foot, it is she who would be
crushed. Thus she is apt at Jesuitical /mezzo termine/, she is a
creature of equivocal compromises, of guarded proprieties, of
anonymous passions steered between two reef-bound shores. She is as
much afraid of her servants as an Englishwoman who lives in dread of a
trial in the divorce-court. This woman--so free at a ball, so
attractive out walking--is a slave at home; she is never independent
but in perfect privacy, or theoretically.
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