The misunderstood woman is pale, fragile, and subject to fainting.  Up to page 99 of the book, Indiana has fainted three times.  I did not continue counting.  This fainting was not the result of bad health.  It was the fashion to faint.  The days of nerves and languid airs had come back.  The women whose grandmothers had walked so firmly to the scaffold, and whose mothers had listened bravely to the firing of the cannon under the Empire, were now depressed and tearful, like so many plaintive elegies.  It was just a matter of fashion.  The misunderstood woman was supposed to be unhappy with her husband, but she would not have been any happier with another man.  Indiana does not find fault with Colonel Delmare for being the husband that he is, but simply for being the husband!

“She did not love her husband, for the mere reason, perhaps, that she was told it was her duty to love him and that it had become her second nature, a principle and a law of her conscience to resist inwardly all moral constraint.”  She affected a most irritating gentleness, an exasperating submissiveness.  When she put on her superior, resigned airs, it was enough to unhinge an angel.  Besides, what was there to complain about, and why should she not accommodate herself to conditions of existence with which so many others fall in?  She must not be compared to others, though.  She is eminently a distinguished woman, and she asks without shrinking:  “Do you know what it means to love a woman such as I am?”

In her long silences and her persistent melancholy, she is no doubt thinking of the love appropriate to a woman such as she is.  She was a princess in exile and times were then hard for princesses.  That is why the one in question took refuge in her homesick sorrow.  All this is what people will not understand.  Instead of rising to such sublimities, or of being lost in fogs, they judge from mere facts.  And on coming across a young wife who is inclined to prefer a handsome, dark young man to a husband who is turning grey, they are apt to conclude:  “Well, this is not the first time we have met with a similar case.  It is hardly worth while making such a fuss about a young plague of a woman who wants to go to the bad.”  It would be very unjust, though, not to recognize that Indiana is a most remarkable novel.  There is a certain relief in the various characters, Colonel Delmare, Raymon, Ralph and Inaiana.  We ought to question the husbands who married wives belonging to the race of misunderstood women brought into vogue by Indiana.

Valentine, too, is the story of a woman unhappily married.