ss 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 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
e