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affects delicacy, a grimace of disgust conceals cupidity. And then woman
feels her weak point guarded by all that casuistry of gallantry which
takes the place of scruples in prudes. It is a line of circumvallation
with a ditch. Every prude puts on an air of repugnance. It is a
protection. She will consent, but she disdains--for the present.
Josiana had an uneasy conscience. She felt such a leaning towards
immodesty that she was a prude. The recoils of pride in the direction
opposed to our vices lead us to those of a contrary nature. It was the
excessive effort to be chaste which made her a prude. To be too much on
the defensive points to a secret desire for attack; the shy woman is not
strait-laced. She shut herself up in the arrogance of the exceptional
circumstances of her rank, meditating, perhaps, all the while, some
sudden lapse from it.
It was the dawn of the eighteenth century. England was a sketch of what
France was during the regency. Walpole and Dubois are not unlike.
Marlborough was fighting against his former king, James II., to whom it
was said he had sold his sister, Miss Churchill. Bolingbroke was in his
meridian, and Richelieu in his dawn. Gallantry found its convenience in
a certain medley of ranks. Men were equalized by the same vices as they
were later on, perhaps, by the same ideas. Degradation of rank, an
aristocratic prelude, began what the revolution was to complete. It was
not very far off the time when Jelyotte was seen publicly sitting, in
broad daylight, on the bed of the Marquise d'Epinay. It is true (for
manners re-echo each other) that in the sixteenth century Smeton's
nightcap had been found under Anne Boleyn's pillow.
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