ankly admits; and he gives his reason. "Women lend
themselves to experiment; men do not. Men are egotists, and absorb
whatever comes in their way. Women, whether Fifines or Elvires, allow
themselves to be absorbed. You master men only by reducing yourself to
their level. You captivate women by showing yourself at your best. Their
power of hero-worship is illustrated by the act of the dolphin, 'True
woman creature,' which bore the ship-wrecked Arion to the Corinthian
coast. Men are not only wanting in true love: their best powers are
called forth by hate. They resemble the vine, first 'stung' into
'fertility' by the browsing goat, which nibbled away its tendrils, and
gained the 'indignant wine' by the process. In their feminine
characteristics Elvire stands far higher than Fifine; but Fifine is for
that very reason more useful as a means of education; for Elvire may be
trusted implicitly; Fifine teaches one to take care of himself. They are
to each other as the strong ship and the little rotten bark." This
comparison is suggested by a boatman whom they lately saw adventurously
pushing his way through shoal and sandbank because he would not wait for
the tide.

Don Juan begs leave to speak one word more in defence of Fifine and her
masquerading tribe; it will recall his early eulogium on her frankness.
"All men are actors: but these alone do not deceive. All you are
expected to applaud in them is the excellence of the avowed sham."

Don Juan has thus developed his theory that soul is attainable through
flesh, truth through falsehood, the real through what only seems; and,
as he thinks, justified the conclusion that a man's spiritual life is
advanced by every experience, moral or immoral, which comes in his way.
He now relates a dream by which, as he says, those abstract reflections
have been in part inspired; in reality, it continues, and in some degree
refutes them. The dream came to him this morning when he had played
himself to sleep with Schumann's Carnival; having chosen this piece
because his brain was burdened with many thoughts and fancies which,
better than any other, it would enable him to work off; and as he tells
this, he enlarges on the faculty of music to register, as well as
express, every passing emotion of the human soul. He notes also the
constant recurrence of the same old themes, and the caprice of taste
which strives as constantly to convert them into something new.

The dream carries him to Venice,