All this philosophizing is the result, no doubt, of having eaten halibut for lunch; it is a solid fish and difficult to digest.

Perhaps, too, having no company but Jeanne and Torp, I am reduced to my own aimless reflections.

Just as clothes exercise no influence on the majority of men, so their emotional life is not much affected by circumstances.  With us women it is otherwise.  We really are different women according to the dresses we wear.  We assume a personality in accord with our costume.  We laugh, talk and act at the caprice of purely external circumstances.

Take for instance a woman who wants to confide in another.  She will do it in quite a different way in broad daylight in a drawing-room than in her little “den” in the gloaming, even if in both cases she happens to be quite alone with her confidante.

If some women are specially honoured as the recipients of many confidences from their own sex, I am convinced they owe it more to physical than moral qualities.  As there are some rooms of which the atmosphere is so cosey and inviting that we feel ourselves at home in them without a word of welcome, so we find certain women who seem to be endowed with such receptivity that they invite the confidences of others.

The history of smiles has never yet been written, simply because the few women capable of writing it would not betray their sex.  As to men, they are as ignorant on this point as on everything else which concerns women—­not excepting love.

I have conversed with many famous women’s doctors, and have pretended to admire their knowledge, while inwardly I was much amused at their simplicity.  They know how to cut us open and stitch us up again—­as children open their dolls to see the sawdust with which they are stuffed and sew them up afterwards with a needle and thread.  But they get no further.  Yes—­a little further perhaps.  Possibly in course of time they begin to discover that women are so infinitely their superiors in falsehood that their wisest course is to appear once and for all to believe them then and there....

Women’s doctors may be as clever and sly as they please, but they will never learn any of the things that women confide to each other.  It is inevitable.  Between the sexes lies not only a deep, eternal hostility, but the unfathomable abyss of a complete lack of reciprocal comprehension.

For instance, all the words in a language will never express what a smile will express—­and between women a smile is like a masonic sign; we can use them between ourselves without any fear of their being misunderstood by the other sex.

Smiles are a form of speech with which we alone are conversant.  Our smiles betray our instincts and our burdens; they reflect our virtues and our inanity.

But the cleverest women hide their real selves behind a factitious smile.

Men do not know how to smile.  They look more or less benevolent, more or less pleased, more or less love-smitten; but they are not pliable or subtle enough to smile.  A woman who is not sufficiently prudent to mask her features, gives away her soul in a smile.  I have known women who revealed their whole natures in this way.