society, and few people are so cruel as to blame it, though all discuss
it. And it is here that the harshness of American and English society
toward the erring woman (harshness which is not injustice, but half-
justice only) contrasts visibly to our advantage over the bad naivete and
lenity of the Italians. The carefully secluded Italian girl is accustomed
to hear of things and speak of things which, with us, parents strive in
every way to keep from their daughters' knowledge; and while her sense of
delicacy is thus early blunted, while she is thus used to know good and
evil, she hears her father and mother comment on the sinful errors of a
friend or neighbor, who visits them and meets them every day in society.
How can the impunity of the guilt which she believes to exist around her
but sometimes have its effect, and ripen, with opportunity, into wrong?
Nay, if the girl reveres her parents at all, how can she think the sin,
which they caress in the sinner, is so very bad? If, however, she escape
all these early influences of depravation; if her idleness, and solitude
and precocious knowledge leave her unvitiated, if, when she goes into
society, it is by marriage with a man who is neither a dotard nor a
fortune-seeker, and who remains constant and does not tempt her, by
neglect, to forbode offense and to inflict anticipative reprisals--yet her
purity goes uncredited, as her guilt would go unpunished; scandal makes
haste to blacken her name to the prevailing hue; and whether she has sin
or not, those with sin will cast, not the stone that breaks and kills, but
the filth that sticks and stinks. The wife must continue the long social
exile of her girlhood if she would not be the prey of scandal. The
_cavaliere servente_ no longer exists, but gossip now attributes
often more than one lover in his place, and society has the cruel clemency
to wink at the license. Nothing is in worse taste than jealousy, and,
consequently, though intrigue sometimes causes stabbing, and the like,
among low people, it is rarely noticed by persons of good breeding. It
seems to me that in Venetian society the reform must begin, not with