Your Caroline, so enticing five hours before in this very chamber where she frisked about like an eel, is now a junk of lead.  Were you the Tropical Zone in person, astride of the Equator, you could not melt the ice of this little personified Switzerland that pretends to be asleep, and who could freeze you from head to foot, if she liked.  Ask her one hundred times what is the matter with her, Switzerland replies by an ultimatum, like the Diet or the Conference of London.

Nothing is the matter with her:  she is tired:  she is going to sleep.

The more you insist, the more she erects bastions of ignorance, the more she isolates herself by chevaux-de-frise.  If you get impatient, Caroline begins to dream!  You grumble, you are lost.

Axiom.—­Inasmuch as women are always willing and able to explain their strong points, they leave us to guess at their weak ones.

Caroline will perhaps also condescend to assure you that she does not feel well.  But she laughs in her night-cap when you have fallen asleep, and hurls imprecations upon your slumbering body.

WOMEN’S LOGIC.

You imagine you have married a creature endowed with reason:  you are woefully mistaken, my friend.

Axiom.—­Sensitive beings are not sensible beings.

Sentiment is not argument, reason is not pleasure, and pleasure is certainly not a reason.

“Oh! sir!” she says.

Reply “Ah! yes!  Ah!” You must bring forth this “ah!” from the very depths of your thoracic cavern, as you rush in a rage from the house, or return, confounded, to your study.

Why?  Now?  Who has conquered, killed, overthrown you!  Your wife’s logic, which is not the logic of Aristotle, nor that of Ramus, nor that of Kant, nor that of Condillac, nor that of Robespierre, nor that of Napoleon:  but which partakes of the character of all these logics, and which we must call the universal logic of women, the logic of English women as it is that of Italian women, of the women of Normandy and Brittany (ah, these last are unsurpassed!), of the women of Paris, in short, that of the women in the moon, if there are women in that nocturnal land, with which the women of the earth have an evident understanding, angels that they are!

The discussion began after breakfast.  Discussions can never take place in a household save at this hour.  A man could hardly have a discussion with his wife in bed, even if he wanted to:  she has too many advantages over him, and can too easily reduce him to silence.  On leaving the nuptial chamber with a pretty woman in it, a man is apt to be hungry, if he is young.  Breakfast is usually a cheerful meal, and cheerfulness is not given to argument.  In short, you do not open the business till you have had your tea or your coffee.

You have taken it into your head, for instance, to send your son to school.  All fathers are hypocrites and are never willing to confess that their own flesh and blood is very troublesome when it walks about on two legs, lays its dare-devil hands on everything, and is everywhere at once like a frisky pollywog.  Your son barks, mews, and sings; he breaks, smashes and soils the furniture, and furniture is dear; he makes toys of everything, he scatters your papers, and he cuts paper dolls out of the morning’s newspaper before you have read it.