hey ignore even
the language of the rest; tongues may move and eyes may see in their
presence but neither sound nor look has reached them; to them, the
people are as if they were not. The British present an image of their
own island, where law rules everything, where all is automatic in
every station of life, where the exercise of virtue appears to be the
necessary working of a machine which goes by clockwork. Fortifications
of polished steel rise around the Englishwoman behind the golden wires
of her household cage (where the feed-box and the drinking-cup, the
perches and the food are exquisite in quality), but they make her
irresistibly attractive. No people ever trained married women so
carefully to hypocrisy by holding them rigidly between the two extremes
of death or social station; for them there is no middle path between
shame and honor; either the wrong is completed or it does not exist;
it is all or nothing,--Hamlet's "To be or not to be." This alternative,
coupled with the scorn to which the customs of her country have trained
her, make an Englishwoman a being apart in the world. She is a helpless
creature, forced to be virtuous yet ready to yield, condemned to live
a lie in her heart, yet delightful in outward appearance--for these
English rest everything on appearances. Hence the special charms of
their women: the enthusiasm for a love which is all their life; the
minuteness of their care for their persons; the delicacy of their
passion, so charmingly rendered in the famous scene of Romeo and
Juliet in which, with one stroke, Shakespeare's genius depicted his
country-women.

You, who envy them so many things, what can I tell you that you do not
know of these white sirens, impenetrable apparently but easily fathomed,
who believe that love suffices love, and turn enjoyments to satiety
by never varying them; whose soul has one note only, their voice one
syllable--an ocean of love in themselves, it is true, and he who has
never swum there misses part of the poetry of the senses, as he who has
never seen the sea has lost some strings of his lyre. You know the
why and wherefore of these words. My relations with the Marchioness
of Dudley had a disastrous celebrity. At an age when the senses have
dominion over our conduct, and when in my case they had been violently
repressed by circumstances, the image of the saint bearing her slow
martyrdom at Clochegourde shone so vividly before my mind that I was
able to resist