Good-bye, Model of all the Virtues!  We can spare you now.  A little clear perfection, undiluted with human weakness, goes a great way.  Go! be useful, be honorable and honored, be just, be charitable, talk pure reason, and help to disenchant the world by the light of an achromatic understanding.  Good-bye!  Where is my Beranger?  I must read “Fretillon.”

Fair play for all.  But don’t claim incompatible qualities for anybody.  Justice is a very rare virtue in our community.  Everything that public sentiment cares about is put into a Papin’s digester, and boiled under high pressure till all is turned into one homogeneous pulp, and the very bones give up their jelly.  What are all the strongest epithets of our dictionary to us now?  The critics and politicians, and especially the philanthropists, have chewed them, till they are mere wads of syllable-fibre, without a suggestion of their old pungency and power.

Justice!  A good man respects the rights even of brute matter and arbitrary symbols.  If he writes the same word twice in succession, by accident, he always erases the one that stands second; has not the first-comer the prior right?  This act of abstract justice, which I trust many of my readers, like myself, have often performed, is a curious anti-illustration, by the way, of the absolute wickedness of human dispositions.  Why doesn’t a man always strike out the first of the two words, to gratify his diabolical love of injustice?

So, I say, we owe a genuine, substantial tribute of respect to these filtered intellects which have left their womanhood on the strainer.  They are so clear that it is a pleasure at times to look at the world of thought through them.  But the rose and purple tints of richer natures they cannot give us, and it is not just to them to ask it.

Fashionable society gets at these rich natures very often in a way one would hardly at first think of.  It loves vitality above all things, sometimes disguised by affected languor, always well kept under by the laws of good-breeding,—­but still it loves abundant life, opulent and showy organizations,—­the spherical rather than the plane trigonometry of female architecture,—­plenty of red blood, flashing eyes, tropical voices, and forms that bear the splendors of dress without growing pale beneath their lustre.  Among these you will find the most delicious women you will ever meet,—­women whom dress and flattery and the round of city gayeties cannot spoil,—­talking with whom, you forget their diamonds and laces,—­and around whom all the nice details of elegance, which the cold-blooded beauty next them is scanning so nicely, blend in one harmonious whole, too perfect to be disturbed by the petulant sparkle of a jewel, or the yellow glare of a bangle, or the gay toss of a feather.

There are many things that I, personally, love better than fashion or wealth.  Not to speak of those highest objects of our love and loyalty, I think I love ease and independence better than the golden slavery of perpetual matinees and soirees, or the pleasures of accumulation.