decided,
never was woman so womanlike as then. Never, covering her frailty by her
charms, and her weakness by her omnipotence, has she claimed absolution
more imperiously. In making the forbidden the permitted fruit, Eve fell;
in making the permitted the forbidden fruit, she triumphs. That is the
climax. In the eighteenth century the wife bolts out her husband. She
shuts herself up in Eden with Satan. Adam is left outside.

III.

All Josiana's instincts impelled her to yield herself gallantly rather
than to give herself legally. To surrender on the score of gallantry
implies learning, recalls Menalcas and Amaryllis, and is almost a
literary act. Mademoiselle de Scudery, putting aside the attraction of
ugliness for ugliness' sake, had no other motive for yielding to
Pelisson.

The maiden a sovereign, the wife a subject, such was the old English
notion. Josiana was deferring the hour of this subjection as long as she
could. She must eventually marry Lord David, since such was the royal
pleasure. It was a necessity, doubtless; but what a pity! Josiana
appreciated Lord David, and showed him off. There was between them a
tacit agreement neither to conclude nor to break off the engagement.
They eluded each other. This method of making love, one step in advance
and two back, is expressed in the dances of the period, the minuet and
the gavotte.

It is unbecoming to be married--fades one's ribbons and makes one look
old. An espousal is a dreary absorption of brilliancy. A woman handed
over to you by a notary, how commonplace! The brutality of marriage
creates definite situations; suppresses the will; kills choice; has a
syntax, like grammar; replaces inspiration by orthography; makes a
dictation of love; disperses all life's mysteries; diminishes the rights
both of sovereign and subject; by a turn of the scale destroys the
charming equilibrium of the sexes, the one robust in bodily strength,
the other all-powerful in feminine weakness--strength on one side,
beauty on the other; makes one a master and the other a servant, while
without marriage one is a slave, the other a queen.

To make Love prosaically decent, how gross! to deprive it of all
impropriety, how dull!

Lord David was ripening. Forty; 'tis a marked period. He did not
perceive this, and in truth he looked no more than thirty. He considered
it more amusing to desire Josiana than to possess her. He possessed
others. He had mistresses. On the other hand