CHAPTER IV
WOMEN LOVE BETTER THAN MEN
How many people understand what love means? How many appreciate it? How many ever realize what it is? For some it is a more or less sickly sentiment, for others merely violent desires.
Alas! it requires so many qualifications to appreciate love that very few people are sufficiently free from some vulgarity or other to be worthy of speaking of love without profanity.
Love requires too much constancy to suit the light-hearted, too much ardour to suit calm temperaments, too much reserve to suit violent constitutions, too much delicacy to suit people destitute of refinement, too much enthusiasm to suit cool hearts, too much diplomacy to suit the simple-minded, too much activity to suit indolent characters, too many desires to suit the wise.
See what love requires to be properly and thoroughly appreciated, and you will easily understand why it must be in woman's nature to love better and longer than man.
Men can worship better than women, but women can love better than men. Of this there can be no doubt.
Very often women believe that they are loved when they are only ardently desired because they are beautiful, piquant, elegant, rich, difficult to obtain, and because men are violent, ambitious, wilful, and obstinate; and the more obstacles there are in their way, the more bent they feel on triumphing over difficulties.