And capture them for veils, if not for vice.”

“But marriage is a capture, too,” I said.

“If so,” he answer’d, “yet a natural state,

Made statelier through authority of law,

That, otherwise, might authorize the wrong;—

A state to which, as not to convent life,

All social instincts prompt; may prompt the more

The more one’s years. Who then can it forswear?—

Think you a maid, with half her moods unform’d

At twenty, can conceive what thoughts may come