these encounters I carried away the impression that they are the most impossible and most wearying women in the world.  I do not know whether, generally speaking, they are more virtuous than their French or Italian sisters; I only know that they are more pathetic.  The very remembrance of it gives me a creepy sensation.  I can understand an elegy over a broken pitcher when you behold the shards for the first time; but to go on with the same pathos over a much mended pitcher, looks more like a comic opera.  A pleasant role that of the listener, whom courtesy bids to take it seriously.

Strange, fantastic women with fiery imagination and cold temperaments!  In their sentiments there is neither cheerfulness nor even simplicity.  They are in love with the outward forms of love, caring less for its intrinsic value.  With French or Italian women after the first skirmishes, you may be sure of your “ergo.”  With a Pole it is different.  Somebody said that if a man is mistaken and says two and two makes five, you may be able to set him right; a woman says two and two is a lamp, and you come against a blank wall.  In a Polish woman’s logic two and two may be not four, but a lamp, love, hatred, a cat, tears, duty, scorn; in brief, you cannot foresee anything, calculate upon anything, or guard against anything.  It may be, after all, because of these very pitfalls that their virtue is better guarded than that of other women, if only for the reason that the beleaguering forces get mortally tired.  But what struck me, and what I resented most, is that those pitfalls, barricades, and the whole array of defence are not so much erected for the repulse of the enemy as to give them the sensation of warfare.  I spoke of this in a roundabout way with a clever woman only half a Pole, for her father was an Italian.

She listened to me for a while, then said at last:—­

“It seems to me you are very much like the fox looking at the dovecote.  He does not like, and it makes him wroth, to see the doves dwelling so high, and unlike the hens, always on the wing.  All you have said tells in favor of Polish women.”

“How do you make that out?”

“The more a Polish woman seems intolerable as somebody else’s wife, the more desirable she is to have for one’s own.”

She had driven me into a corner, and I could not find an answer.  Perhaps she is right, and I look upon it from a fox’s point of view.  There is also not the slightest doubt that if I were to marry, especially a Pole, I not only should search for her among the high flying doves, but I should choose a perfectly white one.