Love is the least mundane of passions, the most anti-social, the most savage, the most barbarous.
So the world judges it more severely than mere gallantry or looseness of manners.

In one sense the world is right.

A woman in love betrays her nature and fails in her function, which is to be admired by all men, like a work of art.

A woman is a work of art, the most marvellous that man's industry ever has produced.

A woman is a wonderful artifice, due to the concourse of all the arts mechanical and of all the arts liberal.
She is the work of everybody, she belongs to the world." Therese closed the book and thought that these ideas were only the dreams of novelists who did not know life.