There should be a colossal mother going about the world to turn men over her lap and give them the slipper. They pine for it.
Am I helping forward the general good, or am I only suffering Nature's punishment?
A woman can fasten the bonds of habit on a man, giving him food from her table, hourly strengthening his care for her. By merely putting herself before him every day she makes him think of her. What chance has an exiled woman against the fearful odds of daily life?
Yet sometimes I think I can wait a thousand years. In sun and snow, in wind and dust, a woman waits. If she stretched her hand and said "Come," who could despise her so much as she would despise herself?
What is so cruel as a man? Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, he presses the iron spike of silence in.
Coward!—to let me suffer such anguish!
Is it because I kissed you? That was the highest act of my life! I groped down the black stairs of the Tuileries blinded by light. Why are the natural things called wrong, and the unnatural ones just?
Is it because I said I would come to you sometime? This is what I meant: that it should give me no jealous pang to think of another woman's head on your breast; that there is a wedlock which appearances cannot touch.
No, I never would—I never would seek you; though sometimes the horror of doing without you turns into reproach. What is he doing? He may need me—and I am letting his life slip away. Am I cheating us both of what could have harmed no one?
It is not that usage is broken off.