Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/51

44 Cross flag had saved her hotel, without so much as a teacup being broken in it, that MM. Worth and Offenbach were safe from all bullets, and that society, under the Septennate, promised to be every bit as leste as under the Empire.

In a word, Madame Mila was a type of the women of her time.

The women who go semi-nude in an age which has begun to discover that the nude in sculpture is very immoral; who discuss 'Tue-la' in a generation which decrees Molière to be coarse, and Beaumont and Fletcher indecent; who have the Journal pour Rire on their tables in a day when no one who respects himself would name the Harlot's Progress; who read Beaudelaire and patronise Térésa and Schneider in an era which finds 'Don Juan' gross, and Shakespeare far too plain; who strain all their energies to rival Mlles. Rose Thé and La Petite Boulotte in everything; who go shrimping or oyster-hunting on fashionable sea-shores, with their legs bare to the knee; who go to the mountains with confections, high heels, and gold-tipped canes, shriek over their gambling