sion, that
I too have gone over to the Philistines. It's not that; it is that there
is something sinister about the woman. I am too old for it to frighten
me, but I am good-natured enough for it to pain me. Her quarrel with
society has brought her no happiness, and her outward charm is only the
mask of a dangerous discontent. Her imagination is lodged where her
heart should be! So long as you amuse it, well and good; she's radiant.
But the moment you let it flag, she is capable of dropping you without a
pang. If you land on your feet you are so much the wiser, simply; but
there have been two or three, I believe, who have almost broken their
necks in the fall."

"You are reversing your promise," I said, "and giving me an opinion, but
not an anecdote."

"This is my anecdote. A year ago a friend of mine made her acquaintance
in Berlin, and though he was no longer a young man, and had never been
what is called a susceptible one, he took a great fancy to Madame
Blumenthal. He's a major in the Prussian artillery--grizzled, grave, a
trifle severe, a man every way firm in the faith of his fathers. It's a
proof of Anastasia's charm that such a man should have got into the habit
of going to see her every day of his life. But the major was in love, or
next door to it! Every day that he called he found her scribbling away
at a little ormolu table on a lot of half-sheets of note-paper. She used
to bid him sit down and hold his tongue for a quarter of an hour, till
she had finished her chapter; she was writing a novel, and it was
promised to a publisher. Clorinda, she confided to him, was the name of
the injured heroine. The major, I imagine, had never read a work of
fiction in his life, but he knew by hearsay that Madame Blumenthal's
literature, when put forth in pink covers, was subversive of several
respectable institutions. Besides, he didn't believe in women knowing
how to write at all, and it irritated him to see this inky goddess
correcting proof-sheets under his nose--irritated him the more that, as I
say, he was in love with her and that he ventured to believe she had a
kindness for his years and his honours. And yet she was not such a woman
as he could easily ask to marry him. The result of all this was that he
fell into the way of railing at her intellectual pursuits and saying he
should like to run his sword through her pile of papers. A woman was
clever enough when she could guess her husband's wishes,