Phil. One treads on fine things only.
Arm. They are little lanes all strewn with roses.
Triss. Then, the sonnet seems to you—
Phil. Admirable, new; and never did any one make any thing more beautiful.
Bél. (to Henriette). What! my niece, you listen to what has been read without emotion! You play there but a sorry part!
Hen. We each of us play the best part we can, my aunt; and to be a wit does not depend on our will.
Triss. My verses, perhaps, are tedious to you.
Hen. No. I do not listen.
Phil. Ah! Let us hear the epigram.
But our readers, we think, will consent to spare the epigram. They will relish, however, a fragment taken from a subsequent part of the same protracted scene. The conversation has made the transition from literary criticism to philosophy, in Molière's time a fashionable study rendered such by the contemporary genius and fame of Descartes. Armande resents the limitations imposed upon her sex:—