Smiles are a form of speech with which we alone are conversant. Our smiles betray our instincts and our burdens; they reflect our virtues and our inanity.
But the cleverest women hide their real selves behind a factitious smile.
Men do not know how to smile. They look more or less benevolent, more or less pleased, more or less love-smitten; but they are not pliable or subtle enough to smile. A woman who is not sufficiently prudent to mask her features, gives away her soul in a smile. I have known women who revealed their whole natures in this way.
No woman speaks aloud, but most women smile aloud. And the fact that in so doing we unveil all our artifice, all the whirlpool of our inmost being to each other, proves the extraordinary solidarity of our sex.
When did one woman ever betray another?
This loyalty is not rooted in noble sentiment, but proceeds rather from the fear of betraying ourselves by revealing things that are the secret common property of all womanhood.
And yet, if a woman could be found willing to reveal her entire self?...
I have often thought of the possibility, and at the present moment I am not sure that she would not do our sex an infinite and eternal wrong.
We are compounded so strangely of good and bad, truth and falsehood, that it requires the most delicate touch to unravel the tangled skein of our natures and find the starting point.
No man is capable of the task.