e, ingrate vile, with murderous knife,--

PHIL., ARM., _and_ BEL. That _ingrate_ fever!

TRISS. Bold she assails your lovely life.

PHIL. _Your lovely life!_

ARM. _and_ BEL. Ah!

TRISS. What! reckless of your ladyhood, Still fiercely seeks to
shed your blood,--

PHIL., ARM., _and_ BEL. Ah!

TRISS. And day and night to work you harm. When to the baths
sometime you've brought her, No more ado, with your own arm Whelm
her and drown her in the water.

PHIL. Ah! It is quite overpowering.

BEL. I faint.

ARM. I die from pleasure.

PHIL. A thousand sweet thrills seize one.

ARM. _When to the baths sometime you've brought her,_

BEL. _No more ado, with your own arm_

PHIL. _Whelm her and drown her in the water._ With your own arm,
drown her there in the baths.

ARM. In your verses we meet at each step with charming beauty.

BEL. One promenades through them with rapture.

PHIL. One treads on fine things only.

ARM. They are little lanes all strewn with roses.

TRISS. Then, the sonnet seems to you--

PHIL. Admirable, new; and never did any one make any thing more
beautiful.

BEL. (_to_ HENRIETTE). What! my niece, you listen to what has been
read without emotion! You play there but a sorry part!

HEN. We each of us play the best part we can, my aunt; and to be a
wit does not depend on our will.

TRISS. My verses, perhaps, are tedious to you.

HEN. No. I do not listen.

PHIL. Ah! Let us hear the epigram.

But our readers, we think, will consent to spare the epigram. They will
relish, however, a fragment taken from a subsequent part of the same
protracted scene. The conversation has made the transition from literary
criticism to philosophy, in Moliere's time a fashionable study rendered
such by the contemporary genius and fame of Descartes. Armande resents
the limitations imposed upon her sex:--

ARM. It is insulting our sex too grossly to limit our intelligence
to the power of judging of a skirt, of the make of a garment, of
the beauties of lace, or of a new brocade.

BEL. We must rise above this shameful condition, and bravely
proclaim our emancipation.

TRISS. Every one knows my respect for the fairer sex, and that, if
I render homage to the brightness of their eyes, I also honor the
splendor of