, in loneliness and alarm.

The greater part of our women still hold fast to that code. Even those
who occasionally stray from it do not permit themselves a momentary
doubt as to its truth and sacredness. Where it begins, reasoning
leaves off.

The poets erroneously represent woman as an enigma, a living Sphinx.
Man is a hundred times more of an enigma and a Sphinx. A healthy woman
that is not hysterical may be either good or bad, strong or weak, but
she has more spiritual simplicity than man. Forever and all times the
Ten Commandments are enough for her, whether she live according to
their tenets, or through human frailty set them aside.

The female soul is so dogmatic that I have known a woman whose very
atheism took the form of religion.

It is strange that this code of the honest villager does not exclude
in women either keen intelligence, a subtle mind, or loftiness of
ideas. Their soul seems to have something of the humming-bird which
flits in and out the thickest shrubs, without getting entangled in
their branches, or touching a single leaf.

This may be said especially in regard to Aniela. The greatest
subtility of feeling and thought goes hand in hand with the utmost
simplicity of moral ideas. Her Ten Commandments are the same as the
village girls', with the exception that those of the latter are
wrought on coarse linen, and hers on a web as fine as lace. Why do
I discuss this question? Simply because it is a question of my
happiness, almost my life; for I feel that with all my complex and
intricate philosophy of love, I cannot get over the Ten Commandments.
And how can I conquer them, since I do not even believe in that
philosophy, while Aniela's faith in her principles is calm and
unshaken?

Only the lips that have been drinking at the fountain of doubt opine
that a forbidden kiss is not a sin. A religious woman may be carried
away, as a tree is swept away by a hurricane, by forbidden love, but
she will never acknowledge it.

Shall I ever be able to carry off Aniela? It is possible that my
present state of despondency and discouragement is only a passing one,
and to-morrow I shall feel more hopeful,--to-day all seems impossible.

I wrote once in this same diary that in certain families they
inoculate their children with modesty as they inoculate for small-pox.
The rule which says the wife shall belong to the husband, and in which
Aniela believes so firmly, is strengthened by that modesty, so knitted