Love is a great healer. The worst characteristic traits of a man and of a woman have been known to be cured by it.
Men and women do not love before they are thirty, men especially. Until then it is little more than rehearsing. Fortunate are those who retain for the play the same company they had engaged for the rehearsal.
CHAPTER X
WOMAN'S MISSION IN THIS WORLD
Naturalists make little difference between women and the other females of the animal kingdom: they declare that the mission of woman is to be a mother. Napoleon I., who was a naturalist, being asked to give a definition of the best woman, answered: 'The one who bears most children.' And as for him man was mere 'cannon flesh,' I am surprised he did not say, 'The one who bears most boys.'
Moralists are kinder to women; they go so far as to grant that woman's mission is twofold: that she is intended to be a wife and a mother; that she is to be the guardian of the hearth, submissive and devoted to man, her lord and master; to look after her household, and be absorbed by her duties toward her husband and children.