"I don't know," said Rose, "except that some of them seem a little
dissatisfied and restless, as if--well, as if they wanted something they
haven't got."

"But do they truly want it?" Madame Gréville demanded. "I am willing to
be convinced, but myself, I find of your women of the aristocrat class,
the type most characteristic is"--she paused and said the thing first
to herself in French, then translated--"is a passive epicure in
sensations; sensations mostly mental, irritating or soothing--a pleasant
variety. She waits to be made to feel; she perpetually--tastes. One may
demand whether it is that their precocity has exhausted them before they
are ripe, or whether your Puritan strain survives to make all passion
reprehensible, or whether simply they have too many ideas to leave room
for anything else. But, from whatever cause, they give to a stranger
like me, the impression of being perfectly frigid, perfectly
passionless. And so, as you say, of missing the great thing altogether.

"A few of your women are great, but not as women, and of second-rate men
in petticoats, you have a vast number. But a woman, great by the
qualities of her sex, an artist in womanhood, I have not seen."

"Oh, I wish," cried Rose, "that I knew what you meant by that!"

"Why, regard now," said the actress. "In every capital of Europe--and I
know them all--wherever you find great affairs--matters of state,
diplomacy, politics--you find the influence of women in them; women of
the great world, sometimes, sometimes of the half-world; great women, at
all events, with the power to make or ruin great careers; women at whose
feet men of the first class lay all they have; women the tact of whose