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women not to misuse their sovereignty. They know that the day it bores them to be chaste, they need not cloak sin in the mantle of night. They may wear their lovers on their sleeves in broad daylight, and lose not a pennyweight of consideration. The salon of the woman who is known to have had (or to have) sentimental adventures will be thronged, and people will only smile and say of her that she "distracts" herself. I remember hearing an extraordinary story once of a beautiful woman, the admired and courted holder of a famous salon. The cousin of the friend who told me the story fell a victim to her charms, and was staying with his mother at some Mediterranean resort, when he learnt of the siren's arrival at a neighbouring town. He forsook his mother to rush after her, and remained with her during the greater part of the long summer vacation. When their holiday had drawn to a close, the lady took the train, and called on her lover's mother, and in the highest ancien régime manner, said: "Madame, I come to return your dear son to you." His little fugue, she said, was at an end. The two ladies parted on the best of terms, the one to welcome back the erring sheep (not that a French mother regards her son under these circumstances as an erring sheep), and the other to open the doors of her closed salon in Paris to all the notabilities she had left sighing for her brilliant and hospitable