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wife need to do.

In Paris, there are scarce two orders of beings more different:
for the legislative and executive powers of the shop not resting in
the husband, he seldom comes there: --in some dark and dismal room
behind, he sits commerce-less, in his thrum nightcap, the same
rough son of Nature that Nature left him.

The genius of a people, where nothing but the monarchy is salique,
having ceded this department, with sundry others, totally to the
women,--by a continual higgling with customers of all ranks and
sizes from morning to night, like so many rough pebbles shook long
together in a bag, by amicable collisions they have worn down their
asperities and sharp angles, and not only become round and smooth,
but will receive, some of them, a polish like a brilliant: --
Monsieur le Mari is little better than the stone under your foot.

- Surely,--surely, man! it is not good for thee to sit alone: --
thou wast made for social intercourse and gentle greetings; and
this improvement of our natures from it I appeal to as my evidence.

- And how does it beat, Monsieur? said she.--With all the
benignity, said I, looking quietly in her eyes, that I expected.--
She was going to say something civil in return--but the lad came
into the shop with the gloves.--A propos, said I, I want a couple
of pairs myself.


THE GLOVES. PARIS.


The beautiful grisette rose up when I said this, and going behind
the counter, reach'd down a parcel and untied it: I advanced to
the side over against her: they were all too large. The beautiful
grisette measured them one by one across my hand.--It would not
alter their dimensions.--She begg'd I would try a single pair,
which seemed to be the least.--She held it open;--my hand slipped
into it at once.--It will not do, said I, shaking my head a
little.--No, said she, doing the same thing.

There are certain combined looks of simple subtlety,--where whim,
and sense, and seriousness, and nonsense, are so blended, that all
the languages of Babel set loose together, could not express them;-
-they are communicated and caught so instantaneously, that you can
scarce say which party is the infector. I leave it to your men of
words to swell pages about it--it is enough in the present to say
again, the gloves would not do; so, folding our hands within our
arms, we both lolled upon the counter--it was narrow, and there was
just room for the parcel to lay between us.

The beautiful grisette looked sometimes at the gloves, then
sideways to the window, then at the gloves,--and then at me. I was
not disposed to break silence: --I followed her example: so, I
looked at the gloves, then to the window, then at the gloves, and
then at her,--and so on alternately.

I found I lost considerably in every attack: --she had a quick
black eye, and shot through two such long and silken eyelashes with

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