to decide these things--DIE HERREN
DICHTER--are not agreed to this day whet it's man who's fickle or
woman. In this mood it's one, in that, the other; and the silly world
bleats it after them, like sheep."

"Well, if you wish me to put it more plainly: if what you say were
true, vice would be condoned."

"Vice!!" he cried with derision, and sat up and faced her. "Vice!--my
dear Mada!--sweet, innocent child! ... No, no. A special talent is
needed for that kind of thing; an unlimited capacity for suffering; an
entire renunciation of what is commonly called happiness! You hold the
good old Philistine opinions. You think, no doubt, of two lovers living
together in delirious pleasure, in SAUS UND BRAUS.--Nothing could be
falser. A woman only needs to have the higher want in her nature, and
the suffering is there, too. She's born gifted with the faculty. And a
woman of the type we're speaking of, is as often as not the flower of
her kind.--Or becomes it.--For see all she gains on her way: the mere
passing from hand to hand; the intense impressionable nature; the
process of being moulded--why, even the common prostitute gets a
certain manly breadth of mind, such as you other women never arrive at.
Each one who comes and goes leaves her something: an experience--a turn
of thought--it may be only an intuition--which she has not had before."

"And the contamination? The soul?" cried Madeleine; two red spots had
come out on her cheeks.

"As you understand it, such a woman has no soul, and doesn't need one.
All she needs is tact and taste."

"You are the eternal scoffer."

"I never was more serious in my life.--But let us put it another way.
What does a--what does any beautiful woman want with a soul, or brains,
or morals, or whatever you choose to call it? Let her give thanks,
night and day, that she is what she is: one of the few perfect things
on this imperfect earth. Let her care for her beauty, and treasure it,
and serve it. Time enough when it is gone, to cultivate the soul--if,
indeed, she doesn't bury herself alive, as it's her duty to do, instead
of decaying publicly. Mada! do you know a more disgusting, more
humiliating sight than the sagging of the skin on a neck that was once
like marble?--than a mouth visibly losing its form?--the slender
shoulders we have adored, broadening into massivity?--all the fine
spiritual delicacy of youth being touched to heaviness?--all the
barbarous cruelty, in short, with which, bef