It was the dawn of the eighteenth century.  England was a sketch of what France was during the regency.  Walpole and Dubois are not unlike.  Marlborough was fighting against his former king, James II., to whom it was said he had sold his sister, Miss Churchill.  Bolingbroke was in his meridian, and Richelieu in his dawn.  Gallantry found its convenience in a certain medley of ranks.  Men were equalized by the same vices as they were later on, perhaps, by the same ideas.  Degradation of rank, an aristocratic prelude, began what the revolution was to complete.  It was not very far off the time when Jelyotte was seen publicly sitting, in broad daylight, on the bed of the Marquise d’Epinay.  It is true (for manners re-echo each other) that in the sixteenth century Smeton’s nightcap had been found under Anne Boleyn’s pillow.

If the word woman signifies fault, as I forget what Council decided, never was woman so womanlike as then.  Never, covering her frailty by her charms, and her weakness by her omnipotence, has she claimed absolution more imperiously.  In making the forbidden the permitted fruit, Eve fell; in making the permitted the forbidden fruit, she triumphs.  That is the climax.  In the eighteenth century the wife bolts out her husband.  She shuts herself up in Eden with Satan.  Adam is left outside.

III.

All Josiana’s instincts impelled her to yield herself gallantly rather than to give herself legally.  To surrender on the score of gallantry implies learning, recalls Menalcas and Amaryllis, and is almost a literary act.  Mademoiselle de Scudery, putting aside the attraction of ugliness for ugliness’ sake, had no other motive for yielding to Pelisson.

The maiden a sovereign, the wife a subject, such was the old English notion.  Josiana was deferring the hour of this subjection as long as she could.  She must eventually marry Lord David, since such was the royal pleasure.  It was a necessity, doubtless; but what a pity!  Josiana appreciated Lord David, and showed him off.  There was between them a tacit agreement neither to conclude nor to break off the engagement.  They eluded each other.  This method of making love, one step in advance and two back, is expressed in the dances of the period, the minuet and the gavotte.

It is unbecoming to be married—­fades one’s ribbons and makes one look old.  An espousal is a dreary absorption of brilliancy.  A woman handed over to you by a notary, how commonplace!  The brutality of marriage creates definite situations; suppresses the will; kills choice; has a syntax, like grammar; replaces inspiration by orthography; makes a dictation of love; disperses all life’s mysteries; diminishes the rights both of sovereign and subject; by a turn of the scale destroys the charming equilibrium of the sexes, the one robust in bodily strength, the other all-powerful in feminine weakness—­strength on one side, beauty on the other; makes one a master and the other a servant, while without marriage one is a slave, the other a queen.