* * *

A woman's heart is an unfathomable ocean: nothing ever filled it; no one
ever plumbed it. At the surface are glancing waves, or flying spume, or,
it may be, raging billows; beneath are silent depths invisible to man. A
thousand streams flow into it in vain. Towards varying coast-lines it
bears itself variously; here, placid and content; there, dashing furious.
But none ever stamped his marked upon its brim, and always it remains the
refluent, reluctant sea. Of it man knows only the waves that break or
ripple at his feet. It betrays no 31 secrets; it asks not to be
understood. Storm and calm but stir or still its surface, and what
things it hides forever engulfed no one may learn. Subtle, yet mighty;
an eternal, and entrancing, mystery to man.

A man's heart is the enclosing shore; measurable, impressionable,
definite, and overt; thinking to house that sea, shaping it, over looking
it, and staying and governing its tides. Yet changed by it, crumbling
before it, yielding to it: at once its guardian and its slave. Yet
perhaps

The placidest of seas is that which is wholly land-locked.

* * *

Women, apparently, were made for men; men for themselves. Certainly

Men seem to carry out this design of Nature, that they should be
ministered to by women.

* * *