Many men, driven to marriage, prefer a girl taken from a convent, and saturated with piety, to a girl brought up to worldly ideas.

There seems to be no middle course.

A man must marry either an educated girl, who reads the newspapers and comments upon them, who waltzes with a dozen young men, goes to the theatre, devours novels, cares nothing for religion, and makes her own ethics, or an ignorant and innocent young girl, like either of the two Maries.

Perhaps there may be as much danger with the one kind as with the other.

Yet the vast majority of men who are not so old as Arnolphe, prefer a religious Agnes to a budding Celimene.
The two Maries, who were small and slender, had the same figure, the same foot, the same hand.