caprice place in the power of a man who loves one woman another whom he does not love, but whose beauty or position flatters his vanity, he will divide his favors. A woman who loves would recoil with horror from such a proposal, even from a hero or a sovereign.*[1] History cites more than one who has delivered herself to the object of her hatred to rescue the object of her love, and statistics have shown that, of twenty young girls convicted of theft, nineteen steal for the benefit of a lover! In woman's love there is an imperious requirement of ideality, an almost constant subordination of the physical to the moral. In that of man the material is almost all in the relations of the sexes.
It is the qualities of heart which render these frail creatures such marvelous nurses. A woman prolongs hei watches by the bedside through several successive nights, while the most robust man, exhausted by a night of unrest, falls asleep by the very couch of death. It is from their depth of heart that women draw that sublime tenderness and delicacy that man can never imitate.
Madame de Chantal, about to become a mother, saw her husband, whom she devotedly loved, mortally wounded, in the chase, by the imprudence of one of their young rela- tions. In despair, the young man was about to kill him- self. Madame de Chantal heard of it, and suddenly in- formed him, through the clergyman of the village, that she had chosen him as godfather to her infant.
"A poor working girl was taken to a hospital on account
- ↑ *"God is my witness that if Augustus, master of the universe, were to offer me the title of wife, and with this title should give me the entire world to rule over, I should find more charm and grandeur in being called your concubine than his empress." — Letter of Heloise to Abelard.
