You will hear all about it
when your club meets next time."
"You've been in Paris?" said Mrs. Zachariah. "Isn't it very wicked?"
"Well, that depends on what you call wicked."
"Surely there cannot be two opinions on that point."
"It does seem so; and yet when you live abroad you find that things
which are made a great deal of here are not thought so much of there;
and, what is very curious, they think other things very wrong there
of which we take no account here."
"Is that because they are not Christians?"
"Oh dear no; I am speaking of good Christian people; at least so I
take them to be. And really, when you come to consider it, we all of
us make a great fuss about our own little bit of virtue, and
undervalue the rest--I cannot tell upon whose authority."
"But are they not, Major, dreadfully immoral in France?"
Pauline leaned over her plate and looked Mrs. Coleman straight in the
face.
"Mrs. Coleman, you are English; you--"
Her father put up his hand; he foresaw what was coming, and that upon
this subject Pauline would have defied all the rules of hospitality.
So he replied calmly, but with the calm of suppressed force:
"Mrs.
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