Don Juan invites his wife to walk with him through the fair:  and as he points out its sights to her, he expatiates on the pleasures of vagrancy, and declares that the red pennon waving on the top of the principal booth sends an answering thrill of restlessness through his own frame.  He then passes to a glowing eulogium on the charms of the dark-skinned rope-dancer, Fifine, who forms part of the itinerant show.

Elvire gives tokens of perturbation, and her husband frankly owns that as far as Fifine is concerned, he cannot defend his taste:  he can scarcely account for it.  “Beautiful she is, in her feminine grace and strength, set forth by her boyish dress; but with probably no more feeling than a sprite, and no more conscience than a flower.  It is likely enough that her antecedents have been execrable, and that her life is in harmony with them.”  Still, he does not wish it supposed that he admires a body without a soul:  and he tries to convince himself that Fifine, after all, is not quite without one.  “There is no grain of sand on the sea-shore which may not, once in a century, be the first to flash back the rising sun; there can be no human spirit which does not in the course of its existence greet the Divine light with one answering ray.”

But no heavenly spark can be detected in Fifine; and he is reduced to seeking a virtue for her, a justification for himself, in that very fact.  If she has no virtue, she also pretends to none.  If she gives nothing to society, she asks nothing of it.  His fancy raises up a procession of such women as the world has crowned:  a Helen, a Cleopatra, some Christian saint; he bids Elvire see herself as part of it—­as the true Helen, who, according to the legend, never quitted Greece, contemplated her own phantom within the walls of Troy—­and be satisfied that she is “best” of all.  “All alike are wanting in one grace which Fifine possesses:  that of self-effacement.  Helen and Cleopatra demand unquestioning homage for their own mental as well as bodily charms; the saint demands it for the principle she sets forth.  His love demands that he shall see into her heart; his wife that he shall believe the impossible as regards her own powers of devotion.  Fifine says,’You come to look at my outside, my foreign face and figure my outlandish limbs.  Pay for the sight if it has pleased you, and give me credit for nothing beyond what you see.’  So simply honest an appeal must touch his heart.”

Don Juan well knows what his wife thinks of all this, and he says it for her.  “Fifine attracts him for no such out of the way reason.  Her charm is that she is something new, and something which does not belong to him.  He is the soul of inconstancy; and if he had the sun for his own, he would hanker after other light, were it that of a tallow-candle or a squib.”  But he assures her that this reasoning is unsound, and his amusing himself with a lower thing does not prove that he has become indifferent