Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/35

28 wives of other persons, I would still say, avoid our friend of a million vaudevilles—la petite Mees de seize ans. Ignorance is not innocence, it is a great mistake to suppose that it even secures it. Your Mees would seize Belot and Zola à la reveille des noces. Miladi yonder, for instance, when they come to her from her book-seller's, throws them aside, unread"

"There was a book of Zola's on her table today"

"I would bet ten thousand francs that she had not gone beyond the title-page," interrupted the Duc, with petulance. ", mon cher Della Rocca, is the only sure guarantee in these matters. Women, believe me, never have any principle. Principle is a backbone, and no woman—except bodily—ever possesses any backbone. Their priests and their teachers and their mothers fill them with doctrines and conventionalities—all things of mere word and wind. No woman has any settled principles; if she have any vague ones, it is the uttermost she ever reaches, and those can always be overturned by any man who has any influence over her. But Taste is