Woman is a species of which every woman is a variety. And every man must
make up his mind to this, that
Every woman is a study in herself. However,
If women were comprehensible to men, men and women would be friends, not
lovers (But the race is safe). The simple fact is that
Womanliness is the supreme attraction, in however fair or however frail a
personality it is embodied. And
The sacred function of all womanhood is to kindle in man the divine spark
by means 30 of the mystic flame that burns ever in the vestal breast.
* * *
Every true woman's orbit is determined by two forces: Love and Duty.
Which is another way of saying that
Women, like the lark, are true to the kindred points of heaven and home.
But,
It is only when the two foci are coincident and identical that her orbit
becomes the perfect circle and her home becomes her heaven.
* * *
A woman's heart is an unfathomable ocean: nothing ever filled it; no one
ever plumbed it. At the surface are glancing waves, or flying spume, or,
it may be, raging billows; beneath are silent depths invisible to man. A
thousand streams flow into it in vain. Towards varying coast-lines it
bears itself variously; here, placid and content; there, dashing furious.
But none ever stamped his marked upon its brim, and always it remains the
refluent, reluctant sea. Of it man knows only the waves that break or
ripple at his feet. It betrays no 31 secrets; it asks not to be
understood. Storm and calm but stir or still its surface, and what
things it hides forever engulfed no one may learn. Subtle, yet mighty;
an eternal, and entrancing, mystery to man.
A man's heart is the enclosing shore; measurable, impressionable,
definite, and overt; thinking to house that sea, shaping it, over looking
it, and staying and governing its tides. Yet changed by it, crumbling
before it, yielding to it: at once its guardian and its slave. Yet
perhaps
The placidest of seas is that which is wholly land-locked.
* * *