cealment is charming; every
secret stairway of intrigue has a sweet surprise at its close; to be in
conspiracy with one alone against all the rest of humanity is the most
seductive of seductions. Love lives best in this soft twilight, where it
only hears its own heart and one other's beat in the solitude.

But when the reverse of the medal is turned; when every step on the
stairs has been traversed and tired of, when, instead of the heart's
beat, there is but an upbraiding voice, when it is no longer _with_ one
but _from_ one that concealment is needed, then the illicit passion is
its own Nemesis, then nothing were ever drearier, wearier, more anxious,
or more fatiguing than its devious paths become, and they seem to hold
the sated wanderer in a labyrinth of which he knows, and knowing hates,
every wind, and curve, and coil, yet out of which it seems to him he
will never make his way back again into the light of wholesome day.

* * *

My dear, the days of Fontenoy are gone out; everybody nowadays only
tries to get the first fire, by hook or by crook. Ours is an age of
cowardice and cuirassed cannon; chivalry is out of place in it.

* * *

With a woman, the vulgarity that lies in public adulation is apt to
nauseate; at least if she be so little of a woman that she is not vain,
and so much of one that she cares for privacy. For the fame of our age
is not glory but notoriety; and notoriety is to a woman like the bull to
Pasiphae--whilst it caresses it crushes.

* * *

Had she your talent the world would have heard of her. As it is, she
only enjoys herself. Perhaps the better part. Fame is a cone of smoke.
Enjoyment is a loaf of sugar.

* * *

There is no such coward as the woman who toadies Society because she has
outraged Society. The bully is never brave.

"Oignez vilain il vous poindra: poignez vilain il vous oindra," is as
true of the braggart's soul still, as it used to be in the old days of
Froissart, when the proverb was coined.

* * *

She was of opinion with Sganarelle, that "cinq ou six coups de baton
entre gens qui s'aiment ne font que ragaillarder l'affection."

But, like Sganarelle also, she always premised that the right to give
the blows should be hers.

* * *

She was only like any other well-dressed woman after all, and humanity
considers that when genius comes forth in the f