Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/235

 impenetrable as the walls of Pekin; you may ride round them, marvel at them, but never hope to demolish them. But the French mind that manages to keep outside these walls becomes surprisingly enlarged, and then you need ask for no finer or more generous judgment. It needs this finish of magnanimity to so sympathetic a character, rare though it be in France,—for magnanimity is the last quality we may allow the race in general,—to show us how delightful the French can become. For this you must look among the cultured workers of France, the thinkers, the teachers, and men of science. These alone—and they are not loved for it—can recognise and tell the truth about even the mediæval enemy, perfidious Albion.

Frenchwomen of all classes live much more in their bedrooms than Englishwomen do. Of a morning they study, read, work there, give orders to their servants, write letters. These bedrooms are generally very pleasant places, with dressing-rooms off, and clothes closets, so that intimate friends of either sex may pass in and out without indiscretion or awkwardness. The bed itself is a handsome piece of furniture, with curtains to match the big bed-cover, which hides every atom of white, and sometimes, with the pillows in the middle and silk or satin-covered bolster at either end under this coverering, it resembles those imposing mediæval