It is the code of the honest villager, so simple that people like me do not understand it. It seems to us that human life and human souls are too complex to find room in it. Unfortunately we have not found anything to replace it, and consequently we flutter here and there like stray birds, in loneliness and alarm.
The greater part of our women still hold fast to that code. Even those who occasionally stray from it do not permit themselves a momentary doubt as to its truth and sacredness. Where it begins, reasoning leaves off.
The poets erroneously represent woman as an enigma, a living Sphinx. Man is a hundred times more of an enigma and a Sphinx. A healthy woman that is not hysterical may be either good or bad, strong or weak, but she has more spiritual simplicity than man. Forever and all times the Ten Commandments are enough for her, whether she live according to their tenets, or through human frailty set them aside.
The female soul is so dogmatic that I have known a woman whose very atheism took the form of religion.
It is strange that this code of the honest villager does not exclude in women either keen intelligence, a subtle mind, or loftiness of ideas. Their soul seems to have something of the humming-bird which flits in and out the thickest shrubs, without getting entangled in their branches, or touching a single leaf.
This may be said especially in regard to Aniela. The greatest subtility of feeling and thought goes hand in hand with the utmost simplicity of moral ideas. Her Ten Commandments are the same as the village girls', with the exception that those of the latter are wrought on coarse linen, and hers on a web as fine as lace. Why do I discuss this question? Simply because it is a question of my happiness, almost my life; for I feel that with all my complex and intricate philosophy of love, I cannot get over the Ten Commandments. And how can I conquer them, since I do not even believe in that philosophy, while Aniela's faith in her principles is calm and unshaken?
Only the lips that have been drinking at the fountain of doubt opine that a forbidden kiss is not a sin. A religious woman may be carried away, as a tree is swept away by a hurricane, by forbidden love, but she will never acknowledge it.
Shall I ever be able to carry off Aniela? It is possible that my present state of despondency and discouragement is only a passing one, and to-morrow I shall feel more hopeful,—to-day all seems impossible.
I wrote once in this same diary that in certain families they inoculate their children with modesty as they inoculate for small-pox. The rule which says the wife shall belong to the husband, and in which Aniela believes so firmly, is strengthened by that modesty, so knitted into her being, so worked into the system, that I could sooner fancy Aniela cold and lifeless than baring her bosom in my presence.
And I can still delude myself with the idea that I may expect anything from her! It is simple idiocy!