Madame Greville took her time about answering.  “They are an enigma to me,” she said, “I confess it.  I have never seen such women anywhere, as these upper-class Americans.  They are beautiful, clever, they know how to dress.  For the first hour, or day, or week, of an acquaintance, they have a charm quite incomparable.  And, up to a certain point, they exercise it.  Your jeunes filles are amazing.  All over the world, men go mad about them.  But when they marry ...”  She finished the sentence with the ghost of a shrug, and turned to Rose.  “Can you account for them?  Were you wondering at them, too, with those great eyes of yours? Alors!  Are we puzzled by the same thing?  What is it, to you, they lack?”

Rose stirred a little uneasily.  “I don’t know very much,” she said.  “I don’t know them well at all, and of course I shouldn’t criticize ...”

“Ah, child,” broke in the actress, “there you mistake yourself.  One must always criticize.  It is by the power of criticism and the courage of criticism, that we have become different from the beasts.”

“I don’t know,” said Rose, “except that some of them seem a little dissatisfied and restless, as if—­well, as if they wanted something they haven’t got.”

“But do they truly want it?” Madame Greville demanded.  “I am willing to be convinced, but myself, I find of your women of the aristocrat class, the type most characteristic is”—­she paused and said the thing first to herself in French, then translated—­“is a passive epicure in sensations; sensations mostly mental, irritating or soothing—­a pleasant variety.  She waits to be made to feel; she perpetually—­tastes.  One may demand whether it is that their precocity has exhausted them before they are ripe, or whether your Puritan strain survives to make all passion reprehensible, or whether simply they have too many ideas to leave room for anything else.  But, from whatever cause, they give to a stranger like me, the impression of being perfectly frigid, perfectly passionless.  And so, as you say, of missing the great thing altogether.

“A few of your women are great, but not as women, and of second-rate men in petticoats, you have a vast number.  But a woman, great by the qualities of her sex, an artist in womanhood, I have not seen.”

“Oh, I wish,” cried Rose, “that I knew what you meant by that!”

“Why, regard now,” said the actress.  “In every capital of Europe—­and I know them all—­wherever you find great affairs—­matters of state, diplomacy, politics—­you find the influence of women in them; women of the great world, sometimes, sometimes of the half-world; great women, at all events, with the power to make or ruin great careers; women at whose feet men of the first class lay all they have; women the tact of whose hands is trusted to determine great matters.  They may not be beautiful (I have seen a faded little woman of fifty, of no family or wealth, whose salon attracted ministers of state), they haven’t the education, nor the liberties that your women enjoy, and, in the mass, they are not regarded—­how do you say?—­chivalrously.  Yet there they are!