Firstly, my dear, you do not love him.  Before two years are over, you will be sick of adoration.  You will never look on Felipe as a husband; to you he will always be the lover whom you can play with, for that is how all women treat their lovers.  You do not look up to him, or reverence, or worship him as a woman should the god of her idolatry.  You see, I have made a study of love, my sweet, and more than once have I taken soundings in the depth of my own heart.  Now, as the result of a careful diagnosis of your case, I can say with confidence, this is not love.

Yes, dear Queen of Paris, you cannot escape the destiny of all queens.  The day will come when you long to be treated as a light-o’-love, to be mastered and swept off your feet by a strong man, one who will not prostrate himself in adoration before you, but will seize your arm roughly in a fit of jealousy.  Macumer loves you too fondly ever to be able either to resist you or find fault with you.  A single glance from you, a single coaxing word, would melt his sternest resolution.  Sooner or later, you will learn to scorn this excessive devotion.  He spoils you, alas! just as I used to spoil you at the convent, for you are a most bewitching woman, and there is no escaping your siren-like charms.

Worse than all, you are candid, and it often happens that our happiness depends on certain social hypocrisies to which you will never stoop.  For instance, society will not tolerate a frank display of the wife’s power over her husband.  The convention is that a man must no more show himself the lover of his wife, however passionately he adores her, than a married woman may play the part of a mistress.  This rule you both disregard.

In the first place, my child, from what you have yourself told me, it is clear that the one unpardonable sin in society is to be happy.  If happiness exists, no one must know of it.  But this is a small point.  What seems to me important is that the perfect equality which reigns between lovers ought never to appear in the case of husband and wife, under pain of undermining the whole fabric of society and entailing terrible disasters.  If it is painful to see a man whom nature has made a nonentity, how much worse is the spectacle of a man of parts brought to that position?  Before very long you will have reduced Macumer to the mere shadow of a man.  He will cease to have a will and character of his own, and become mere clay in your hands.  You will have so completely moulded him to your likeness, that your household will consist of only one person instead of two, and that one necessarily imperfect.  You will regret it bitterly; but when at last you deign to open your eyes, the evil will be past cure.  Do what we will, women do not, and never will, possess the qualities which are characteristic of men, and these qualities are absolutely indispensable to family life.  Already Macumer, blinded though he is, has a dim foreshadowing of this future; he feels himself less a man through his love.  His visit to Sardinia is a proof to me that he hopes by this temporary separation to succeed in recovering his old self.