I began, however, to look around me, and examine the truth of the philosophy of vice.

I found that no woman, who loved honestly and deeply an illicit lover was happy.

I found, too, the hideous profundity of Rochefoucauld's maxim that a woman--I speak of French women--may live without a lover; but, a lover once admitted, she never goes through life with only one.

She is deserted; she cannot bear the anguish and the solitude; she fills up the void with a second idol.

For her there is no longer a fall from virtue: it is a gliding and involuntary descent from sin to sin, till old age comes on and leaves her without love and without respect.