I wish, however, very seriously, to justify the ideas, to my manner of expressing which you have taken an exception.  I am neither envious nor unjust.  Because I happened to mention my own sex rather than yours, you must not imagine that it is my intention to underrate women.  I hoped to make you understand that, without being more culpable than men, they are more dangerous because they are accustomed more successfully to hide their sentiments.  In effect, you will confess the object of your love sooner than they will acknowledge theirs.  However, when they assure you that their affection for you has no other source than a knowledge of your merit and of your good qualities, I am persuaded that they are sincere.  I do not even doubt that when they realize that their style of thought is becoming less refined, they do everything in their power to hide the fact from themselves.  But the motives, about which I have been telling you, are in the bottom of their hearts just the same.  They are none the less the true causes of the liking they have for you, and whatever efforts they may make to persuade themselves that the causes are wholly spiritual, their desire changes nothing in the nature of things.  They hide this deformity with as much care as they would conceal teeth that might disfigure an otherwise perfect face.  In such case, even when alone they would be afraid to open their mouth, and so, by force of habit in hiding this defect from others as well as from themselves, they succeed in forgetting all about it or in considering that it is not much of a defect.

I agree with you that you would lose too much if men and women were to show themselves in their true colors.  The world has agreed to play a comedy, and to show real, natural sentiments would not be acting, it would be substituting the real character for the one it has been agreed to feign.  Let us then enjoy the enchantment without seeking to know the cause of the charm which amuses and seduces us.  To anatomize love would be to enter upon its cure.  Psyche lost it for having been too curious, and I am tempted to believe that this fable is a lesson for those who wish to analyze pleasure.

I wish to make some corrections in what I have said to you:  If I told you that men are wrong in priding themselves on their choice of a woman, and their sentiments for her; if I said that the motives which actuate them are nothing less than glorious for the men, I desire to add, that they are equally deceived if they imagine that the sentiments which they show with so much pompous display are always created by force of female charms, or by an abiding impression of their merits.  How often does it happen that those men who make advances with such a respectful air, who display such delicate and refined sentiments, so flattering to vanity, who, in a word, seem to breathe only through them, only for them, and have no other desire than their happiness; how often, I repeat, are those men,