curiosity and other motives than love; the second acts with integrity
of sentiment. The first yields; the second makes deliberate choice. Is
not that choice in itself an immense flattery? A woman armed with
experience, forewarned by knowledge, almost always dearly bought,
seems to give more than herself; while the inexperienced and credulous
girl, unable to draw comparisons for lack of knowledge, can appreciate
nothing at its just worth. She accepts love and ponders it. A woman is
a counselor and a guide at an age when we love to be guided and
obedience is delight; while a girl would fain learn all things,
meeting us with a girl's _naivete_ instead of a woman's tenderness.
She affords a single triumph; with a woman there is resistance upon
resistance to overcome; she has but joy and tears, a woman has rapture
and remorse.

A girl cannot play the part of a mistress unless she is so corrupt
that we turn from her with loathing; a woman has a thousand ways of
preserving her power and her dignity; she has risked so much for love,
that she must bid him pass through his myriad transformations, while
her too submissive rival gives a sense of too serene security which
palls. If the one sacrifices her maidenly pride, the other immolates
the honor of a whole family. A girl's coquetry is of the simplest, she
thinks that all is said when the veil is laid aside; a woman's
coquetry is endless, she shrouds herself in veil after veil, she
satisfies every demand of man's vanity, the novice responds but to
one.

And there are terrors, fears, and hesitations--trouble and storm in
the love of a woman of thirty years, never to be found in a young
girl's love. At thirty years a woman asks her lover to give her back
the esteem she has forfeited for his sake; she lives only for him, her