everybody else, and where there are crowds of eyes
to watch all men's—and specially all women's
—doings. This young English girl was somewhat
of an Amazonian—not at all a jeune Meess
of the sentimental and "shocking" school, but
a frank, free, courageous girl, given to an
unconventional breadth of action not a little
perplexing to the more tightly bandaged French
mind. Thus, anything extreme could easily be
attached to her name; and her character itseli
was a nest wherein reports of the wildest
eccentricity could be fledged, and whence they
could take flight. Suddenly a whisper went
through this small French world; the whisper
became a buzz; the buzz grew into a voice—a
dozen voices; and an audible, intelligible, and
tangible report was shaped out of the wordy
cloud that the jeune meess amused herself by
nightly prowlings in the little village and its
environs; for what purpose of course there
were only too many likely conjectures handy.
At last the friends who stood as the girl's
social sponsors heard this report; and being
energetic people, good at winnowing testimony,
they set to work to sift it; and they
certainly sifted it very fine indeed. But, sift
as they would, they could never break up that
central clump round which all the rest had
crystallised, namely, that Meess Blank had been
seen continually at midnight passing under the
arch of the viaduct on her way to the upper
part of the town. There was no doubt about
it: it was her straw bonnet and her blue veil,
her long brown ringlets, her "step of grenadier;"
and let madame and monsieur, her
social sponsors, answer it to their own
knowledge of the world, what of good could a young
meess of well-regulated morals be doing out
alone, prowling about the upper part of the
town at midnight? Meess Blank must be
cut. And cut she was; for all that she had
been in bed and asleep, as a good girl should
have been, on all those midnights when it had
been said that she had been met prowling about
the town in her straw bonnet and blue veil, and
with her long brown ringlets floating round her
shoulders. The mystery of the false presentation
was never solved, and her denial was never
believed; but that was the simple truth, credited
or not. Some one had aped her costume and
general appearance; and thus the real sinner
went scathless, and the innocent victim got
scalped in her stead.

"There is no smoke without some flame."
Granted in a certain sense and to a certain
degree; by no means granted broadly and without
restrictions. For instance, given the flame of
"fast"  tendencies—say a habit of speech
sprinkled with slang, a liking for cigarettes
held with an air and drawn with gusto, and a
decidedly picturesque, not to say startling,
costume; and you may create a smoke of scandal
as thick and black as pitch, and as hard to wash
off, when it has once stuck. Yet there is nothing
essentially immoral in any of Nicotina's
proceedings. The same with dress. A mantilla,
or a yashmak, or a porkpie hat, or crinoline, or
pre-Raffaelite trains, or high boots tasselled and
heeled, or satin slippers without heels, and
sandalled—what does it matter? There is no
absolute crime (though there may be very great
stupidity) in these things. It is a matter of
locality and custom from first to last; and
though we may question the sense, and deny
the charm, of " fast" fashions for ladies, we
ought not to confound a question of taste with
a question of morals. And yet we do. Poor
Nicotina might as well have been caught
shoplifting or pocket-picking. Her star has
gone out from the horizon of the stricter
sort, and before the week is out she will be
cut, with greater or less severity, according to
the extent to which tight-lacing is carried by
the community of censors. For some societies
lace very tightly indeed; and if Nicotina falls
among such as these, she may look out for a
stinging file of scalping-knives, point
downwards, well sharpened, and unerring in aim.

I am not defending feeble mimicry of the
habits of men in the conduct of women. I
should like to utilise Nicotina's cigarette-box
for the destruction of the green fly among my
geraniums, but I would not cut her. There are
two reasons why I would not cut her, and why I
would even do my best to reform and defend
her. One is because I do not think her bad
taste, though abominable in itself, deserves so
severe a punishment; and the other is, because
an imprudence, when treated as a crime, does
really grow into one, however innocent it was
in the beginning. Nicotina, cut for foolish
fastness, and cast adrift from all wholesome
anchorage, is pretty sure to shoot Niagara in the
kind of half-defying revenge so common to
those who are treated with undue and, therefore,
exasperating severity.

But there are not only the causes of cutting
to be considered; there are also the ways and
modes, which vary as much as tempers vary.
Some people cut you with what the French
would call une franchise brutale. These are the
people who know you quite well, who are neither
nervous nor shortsighted, nor given to open-
eyed dreaming, nor in any way likely to forget
their world and overlook society. You go up
to these people—smiling, easy, unsuspecting;
and you are cut. Two eyes look at you coldly,
fixedly; a living face stiffens into a mask:
perhaps the lips of the mask have curled
themselves into a slight sneer, perhaps they remain
loose and expressionless, perhaps they close
themselves tight and hard. Any one of these
three expressions may be adopted, but the face
will be a mask still, and the two eyes will be
simply glass balls deftly coloured, but with no
soul looking through. That is the cut direct—
never mind the cause—and you may get over
it, if you can. If you can, I should say that
the steel was not forged which could cut you.

Then there is the cut indirect; the cut which
leaves a loophole for explanation, and a way
of escape by apology and excuse; the cut
which consists, first of all, in a shuffling away
from you across the road, to the other end
of the room, out at the door, into the garden;
the cut that is betokened by a sudden desire to