two is a lamp, and you come against a blank wall. In a Polish woman's
logic two and two may be not four, but a lamp, love, hatred, a cat,
tears, duty, scorn; in brief, you cannot foresee anything, calculate
upon anything, or guard against anything. It may be, after all,
because of these very pitfalls that their virtue is better guarded
than that of other women, if only for the reason that the beleaguering
forces get mortally tired. But what struck me, and what I resented
most, is that those pitfalls, barricades, and the whole array of
defence are not so much erected for the repulse of the enemy as to
give them the sensation of warfare. I spoke of this in a roundabout
way with a clever woman only half a Pole, for her father was an
Italian.

She listened to me for a while, then said at last:--

"It seems to me you are very much like the fox looking at the
dovecote. He does not like, and it makes him wroth, to see the doves
dwelling so high, and unlike the hens, always on the wing. All you
have said tells in favor of Polish women."

"How do you make that out?"

"The more a Polish woman seems intolerable as somebody else's wife,
the more desirable she is to have for one's own."

She had driven me into a corner, and I could not find an answer.
Perhaps she is right, and I look upon it from a fox's point of view.
There is also not the slightest doubt that if I were to marry,
especially a Pole, I not only should search for her among the high
flying doves, but I should choose a perfectly white one.