"Around her summit, reason, the purest that can illumine a being, keeps
watch; but it displays only the grace and not the effort of light.
Nothing appeared to me colder than reason, until I had seen it thus play
around the brow of a young woman like the lamp of the sanctuary in the
hands of a laughing, innocent child. The lamp leaves nothing in the
shade; but the harshness of its rays does not pass the inner circle of
life, whereas their smiles beautify all that they touch without.
"Her conscience is so natural and so sound that we do not hear it
breathe and that she appears unaware of its existence. She is inflexible
towards the activity which she directs, but with such ease that she
seems to be stopping to rest or to bend over a flower when she is with
all her strength resisting an unjust feeling or thought. A movement, an
ingenuous and sprightly phrase, a tear that laughs, dissembles the
secret of the deep struggle. All that she has acquired has the grace of
instinct; and all that is instinctive has become innocent. Of all the
feminine passions, none has perished, none is a prisoner, for all are
needed, the humblest and most futile and the greatest and most dangerous
alike, to form the perfume that love loves to breathe. But, although not
held in bondage, they live in a sort of enchanted garden, whence they do
not dream of escaping, where they lose the desire to do harm and where
the smaller and more useless, unable to remain inactive, amuse and
divert the greater.