ree from some vulgarity or other to be
worthy of speaking of love without profanity.

Love requires too much constancy to suit the light-hearted, too much
ardour to suit calm temperaments, too much reserve to suit violent
constitutions, too much delicacy to suit people destitute of refinement,
too much enthusiasm to suit cool hearts, too much diplomacy to suit the
simple-minded, too much activity to suit indolent characters, too many
desires to suit the wise.

See what love requires to be properly and thoroughly appreciated, and
you will easily understand why it must be in woman's nature to love
better and longer than man.

Men can worship better than women, but women can love better than men.
Of this there can be no doubt.

Very often women believe that they are loved when they are only ardently
desired because they are beautiful, piquant, elegant, rich, difficult to
obtain, and because men are violent, ambitious, wilful, and obstinate;
and the more obstacles there are in their way, the more bent they feel
on triumphing over difficulties.

To obtain a woman men will risk their lives, ruin themselves, commit any
act of folly or extravagance which you care to name. Women are flattered
by these follies and extravagances due to motives of very different
characters; but they mistake passion for love.

Yet passion is very seldom compatible with true love. Passion is as
fickle as love is constant. Passion is but a proof of vanity and
selfishness.

Woman is only the pretext for the display of it. Singers, actresses,
danseuses, all women detached from that shade and mystery in which love
delights in dwelling, women who give to the public all the treasures of
their beauty, amiability, and talent are those who inspire in men the
most violent passions, but they are seldom truly loved unless they
consent to retire from the glare of the footlights and withdraw to the
shade.

Passion excites vanity, noise, envy: it plays to the gallery. Love seeks
retirement, and prefers a moss bank against some wall covered with ivy,
some solitude where silence is so perfect that two hearts can hear each
other beat, where space is so small that lips must forcibly meet.

The man who takes his bride to Paris for the honeymoon does not really
love her. If he loves truly he will take her to the border of a forest
in some secluded, picturesque spot, where nature will act as a church in
which both will fervently worship.

Now, with very few e