"Marry, then, and put an end to anything so dreadful," says Dorothy Usk.
Brandolin gets up and walks about the room. It is a dilemma which has often been present to his mind in various epochs of his existence.
"You see, my dear people," he says, with affectionate confidence, "the real truth of the matter is this. A good woman is an admirable creation of Providence, for certain uses in her generation; but she is tiresome. A naughty woman is delightful; but then she is, if you marry her, compromising. Which am I to take of the two? I should be bored to death by what Renan calls la femme pure, and against la femme tarée as a wife I have a prejudice. The woman who would amuse me I would not marry if I could, and as, if I were bored, I should leave my wife entirely, and go to the Equator or the Pole, it would not be honest in me to sacrifice a virgin to the mere demands of my family pride."
Lady Usk feels shocked, but she does not like to show it, because it is so old-fashioned and prudish and arriéré nowadays to be shocked at anything.
"I have thought about it very often, I assure you," continues Brandolin, "and sometimes I have really thought that I would marry a high-caste Hindoo woman. They are very beautiful, and their forms far more exquisite than any European's, wholly uncramped as they are by any stays, and accustomed to spend so many hours on all kinds of arts for the embellishment of the skin."
"I don't think, you know," Lady Usk interposes, hastily, to repress more reminiscences, "that you need be afraid of the young girls of our time being innocent: they are éveillées enough, heaven knows, and experienced enough in all conscience."
"Oh, but that is odious," says Brandolin, with disgust. "The girls of the day are horrible; nothing is unknown to them; they smoke, they gamble, they flirt without decency or grace, their one idea is to marry for sake of a position which will let them go as wild as they choose, and for the sake of heaps of money which will sustain their unconscionable extravagance. Lord deliver me from any of them! I would sooner see St. Hubert's Lea cut up into allotment-grounds than save it from the Southesk-Vanes by marrying a débutante with her mind fixed on establishing herself, and her youthful memories already full of dead-and-gone flirtations. No! let me wait for Dodo, if you will give me permission to educate her."
"Dodo will never be educated out of flirting; she is born for it," says her father, "and she will be a handful when she gets into society. I am afraid you would return her to us and sigh for your high-caste Hindoo."
"Pray, how would you educate her? what is missing in her present education?" asks Lady Usk, somewhat piqued at what he implies.
"I would let her see a great deal more of her mother than she is allowed to do," says Brandolin: "where could she take a better model?" he adds, with a bow of much grace.