Who has not admired their apparent superiority and calm, at the moment when they were trembling for the mysterious treasures of their love?
Who has not studied their ease and facility, their presence of mind in the midst of the most critical embarrassments of social life?
There is nothing awkward about it; their deception flows as softly as the snow falls from heaven.
"Yet there are men that have the presumption to expect to get the better of the Parisian woman!--of the woman who possesses thirty-seven thousand ways of saying 'No,' and incommensurable variations in saying 'Yes.'" This is a Frenchman's view of life in a country where women are trained more systematically for the mere purposes of attraction than in any other country, and where the pursuit of admiration and the excitement of winning lovers are represented by its authors as constituting the main staple of woman's existence.

France, unfortunately, is becoming the great society-teacher of the world.
What with French theatres, French operas, French novels, and the universal rush of American women for travel, France is becoming so powerful on American fashionable society, that the things said of the Parisian woman begin in some cases to apply to some women in America.
Lillie was as precisely the woman here described as if she had been born and bred in Paris.

She had all the thirty-seven thousand ways of saying "No," and the incommensurable variations in saying "Yes," as completely as the best French teaching could have given it.

She possessed, and had used, all that graceful facility, in the story of herself that she had told John in the days of courtship.

Her power over him was based on a dangerous foundation of unreality.