rld and the flesh; and of that sowing she was now to reap all the
disquiets, the vexations, the tremors, that go to fill the pages of
French novels,--records of women who marry where they cannot love, to
serve the purposes of selfishness and ambition, and then make up for
it by loving where they cannot marry. If all the women in America who
have practised, and are practising, this species of moral agriculture
should stand forth together, it would be seen that it is not for
nothing that France has been called the society educator of the world.

The apartments of the Follingsbee mansion, with their dreamy
voluptuousness, were eminently adapted to be the background and
scenery of a dramatic performance of this kind. There were vistas of
drawing-rooms, with delicious boudoirs, like side chapels in a temple
of Venus, with handsome Charlie Ferrola gliding in and out, or
lecturing dreamily from the corner of some sofa on the last
most important crinkle of the artistic rose-leaf, demonstrating
conclusively that beauty was the only true morality, and that there
was no sin but bad taste; and that nobody knew what good taste was but
himself and his clique. There was the discussion, far from edifying,
of modern improved theories of society, seen from an improved
philosophic point of view; of all the peculiar wants and needs of
etherealized beings, who have been refined and cultivated till it is
the most difficult problem in the world to keep them comfortable,
while there still remains the most imperative necessity that they
should be made happy, though the whole universe were to be torn down
and made over to effect it.

The idea of not being happy, and in all respects as blissful as they
could possibly be made, was one always assumed by the Follingsbee
clique as an injustice to be wrestled with. Anybody that did not
affect them agreeably, that jarred on their nerves, or interrupted
the delicious reveries of existence with the sharp saw-setting of
commonplace realities, in their view ought to be got rid of summarily,
whether that somebody were husband or wife, parent or child.

Natures that affected each other pleasantly were to spring together
like dew-drops, and sail off on rosy clouds with each other to the
land of Do-just-as-you-have-a-mind-to.

The only thing never to be enough regretted, which prevented this
immediate and blissful union of particles, was the impossibility of
living on rosy clouds, and making them the means