The men, my dear, seemed to me generally very ugly.  The very few exceptions are bad copies of us.  Heaven knows what evil genius has inspired their costume; it is amazingly inelegant compared with those of former generations.  It has no distinction, no beauty of color or romance; it appeals neither to the senses, nor the mind, nor the eye, and it must be very uncomfortable.  It is meagre and stunted.  The hat, above all, struck me; it is a sort of truncated column, and does not adapt itself in the least to the shape of the head; but I am told it is easier to bring about a revolution than to invent a graceful hat.  Courage in Paris recoils before the thought of appearing in a round felt; and for lack of one day’s daring, men stick all their lives to this ridiculous headpiece.  And yet Frenchmen are said to be fickle!

The men are hideous anyway, whatever they put on their heads.  I have seen nothing but worn, hard faces, with no calm nor peace in the expression; the harsh lines and furrows speak of foiled ambition and smarting vanity.  A fine forehead is rarely seen.

“And these are the product of Paris!” I said to Miss Griffith.

“Most cultivated and pleasant men,” she replied.

I was silent.  The heart of a spinster of thirty-six is a well of tolerance.

In the evening I went to the ball, where I kept close to my mother’s side.  She gave me her arm with a devotion which did not miss its reward.  All the honors were for her; I was made the pretext for charming compliments.  She was clever enough to find me fools for my partners, who one and all expatiated on the heat and the beauty of the ball, till you might suppose I was freezing and blind.  Not one failed to enlarge on the strange, unheard-of, extraordinary, odd, remarkable fact—­that he saw me for the first time.

My dress, which dazzled me as I paraded alone in my white-and-gold drawing-room, was barely noticeable amidst the gorgeous finery of most of the married women.  Each had her band of faithful followers, and they all watched each other askance.  A few were radiant in triumphant beauty, and amongst these was my mother.  A girl at a ball is a mere dancing-machine—­a thing of no consequence whatever.

The men, with rare exceptions, did not impress me more favorably here than at the Champs-Elysees.  They have a used-up look; their features are meaningless, or rather they have all the same meaning.  The proud, stalwart bearing which we find in the portraits of our ancestors—­men who joined moral to physical vigor—­has disappeared.  Yet in this gathering there was one man of remarkable ability, who stood out from the rest by the beauty of his face.  But even he did not rouse in me the feeling which I should have expected.  I do not know his works, and he is a man of no family.  Whatever the genius and the merits of a plebeian or a commoner, he could never stir my blood.  Besides, this man was obviously so much more taken up with