American ladies are known abroad for two distinguishing traits (besides, possibly, their beauty and self-reliance), and these are their ill-health and their extravagant devotion to dress.
Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.
Such a mind we must desire to see in a woman,--a mind that stirs without irritating you, that arouses but does not belabour, amuses and yet subtly instructs.
A girl's coquetry is of the simplest, she thinks that all is said when the veil is laid aside; a woman's coquetry is endless, she shrouds herself in veil after veil, she satisfies every demand of man's vanity, the novice responds but to one.
Our grandsire, Adam, ere of Eve possesst,
Alone, and e'en in Paradise unblest,
With mournful looks the blissful scenes survey'd,
And wander'd in the solitary shade.
The Maker say, took pity, and bestow'd
Woman, the last, the best reserv'd of God.
The desire which a man has for a woman is not directed towards her because she is a human being, but because she is a woman ; that she is a human being is of no concern to the man; only her sex is the object of his desires.
Woman is the embodiment of sacrifice and suffering and her advent to public life should, therefore, result in purifying it, in restraining unbridled ambition and accumulation of property.
A man who admires a fine woman, has yet not more reason to wish himself her husband, than one who admired the Hesperian fruit, would have had to wish himself the dragon that kept it.