emoiselles comme il faut to walk alone even in
the most sequestered paths of the Bois.

I begin now to comprehend your disdain of customs which impose chains so
idly galling on the liberty of our sex.

We dined with the Savarins last evening: what a joyous nature he has!
Not reading Latin, I only know Horace by translations, which I am told
are bad; but Savarin seems to me a sort of half Horace,--Horace on
his town-bred side, so playfully well-bred, so good-humoured in his
philosophy, so affectionate to friends, and so biting to foes. But
certainly Savarin could not have lived in a country farm upon endives
and mallows. He is town-bred and Parisian, jusqu'au bout des ongles.
How he admires you, and how I love him for it! Only in one thing
he disappoints me there. It is your style that he chiefly praises:
certainly that style is matchless; but style is only the clothing of
thought, and to praise your style seems to me almost as invidious as the
compliment to some perfect beauty, not on her form and face, but on her
taste and dress.

We met at dinner an American and his wife,--a Colonel and Mrs. Morley:
she is delicately handsome, as the American women I have seen generally
are, and with that frank vivacity of manner which distinguishes them
from English women. She seemed to take a fancy to me, and we soon grew
very good friends.

She is the first advocate I have met, except yourself, of that doctrine
upon the rights of Women, of which one reads more in the journals than
one hears discussed in salons. Naturally enough I felt great interest
in that subject, more especially since my rambles in the Bois were
forbidden; and as long as she declaimed on the hard fate of the women
who, feeling within them powers that struggle for air and light beyond
the close precinct of household duties, find themselves restricted from
fair rivalry with men in such fields of knowledge and toil and glory as
men since the world began have appropriated to themselves, I need not
say that I went with her cordially: you can guess that by my former
letters. But when she entered into the detailed catalogue of our exact
wrongs and our exact rights, I felt all the pusillanimity of my sex and
shrank back in terror.

Her husband, joining us when she was in full tide of eloquence, smiled
at me with a kind of saturnine mirth. "Mademoiselle, don't believe a
word she says: it is only tall talk! In America the women are absolute
tyrants, and it is I who,