thoughts are full of his future, he must have a great career, she bids
him make it glorious; she can obey, entreat, command, humble herself,
or rise in pride; times without number she brings comfort when a young
girl can only make moan. And with all the advantages of her position,
the woman of thirty can be a girl again, for she can play all parts,
assume a girl's bashfulness, and grow the fairer even for a mischance.

Between these two feminine types lies the immeasurable difference
which separates the foreseen from the unforeseen, strength from
weakness. The woman of thirty satisfies every requirement; the young
girl must satisfy none, under penalty of ceasing to be a young girl.
Such ideas as these, developing in a young man's mind, help to
strengthen the strongest of all passions, a passion in which all
spontaneous and natural feeling is blended with the artificial
sentiment created by conventional manners.

The most important and decisive step in a woman's life is the very one
that she invariably regards as the most insignificant. After her
marriage she is no longer her own mistress, she is the queen and the
bond-slave of the domestic hearth. The sanctity of womanhood is
incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman
emancipation means corruption. If you give a stranger the right of
entry into the sanctuary of home, do you not put yourself at his
mercy? How then if she herself bids him enter it? Is not this an
offence, or, to speak more accurately, a first step towards an
offence? You must either accept this theory with all its consequences,
or absolve illicit passion. French society hitherto has chosen the
third and middle course of looking on and laughing when offences come,
apparently upon the Spartan principle of condoning the theft and
punishing clumsiness. And this system, it may be, is a very wise one.