Page:Maud Howe - Atlanta in the South.djvu/111

 in Paris, presented to society in London, courted in St. Petersburg, where Darius Harden followed me, married in Rome, and settled in New Orleans, where I have lived five years, and which I alternately love and curse with equal enthusiasm. For six months in the year I would rather be a cat in Paris than a princess in Louisiana; for the other six months I believe that New Orleans is the only winter city in the world fit for human beings to live in."

She had the broadness and the superficiality of those world-citizens who, butterfly-like, suck the honey from every flower in the world's garden, while they shirk the wholesome responsibility of weeding and digging in the patch where their own particular seed happens to have been planted. Her female friends asserted confidently that she had no heart. Most of the men of her acquaintance accepted the theory, and liked her none the less for believing it. Her genuine good nature, her hearty comradeship, and her comely person sufficed to make her an exceedingly agreeable woman; and what right has the world to ask more of its women or its men? Once that world (which means you and me, reader, as well as our sisters-in-law and fathers' wives) is convinced that one of its people has a heart, it does not rest till it has endowed that heart with some base or hope less passion, for which we must either despise or