xceptions, women understand these things much better
than men. They are born with feelings of delicacy and refinement that
only few men can acquire or develop; they are more earnest, more
poetical, better diplomatists, and of temperaments generally more
artistic.

Besides--and it is in this that they are infinitely superior to
men--whereas many men see their love cooled by possession, all women see
theirs increased and sealed by it.

The moment a woman is possessed by the man she loves, she belongs to him
body, heart, and soul. Her love is the occupation of her life, her only
thought, and, I may add without the slightest idea of irreverence, her
religion.

She loves that man as she does God. If all men could only be
sufficiently impressed with this fact, how kind and devoted to women
they would be!

CHAPTER V

IS WOMAN A RESPONSIBLE BEING?

There are nations still in existence where women are denied the
possession of a soul; but these nations are not civilized. Now, Germany
and England are civilized nations, yet I am not sure that some Germans
and Englishmen really admit that women are beings possessed of a mind.

I have constantly heard Englishmen of 'the good old school' say: 'If a
man steals my horse, my dog, my poultry, I have him arrested, and he
gets a few months' imprisonment; if he steals my wife, he remains at
large, unmolested. Yet, is not my wife my most valuable property?' And
that good Englishman is absolutely persuaded that his argument is
unanswerable.

The other day, in a German paper, I read the following exquisitely
delicious remark: 'We have a treaty of extradition with Switzerland. If
the man Giron had stolen the least valuable horse of the Crown Prince of
Saxony, we could have had him arrested in Geneva and returned to us; but
as he only stole the wife of that prince, the mother of his children, we
can do nothing.'

From all this we are bound to conclude that, in the eyes of many
Germans and some Englishmen, a woman is like a horse or any other
animal, a thing, a 'brute of no understanding,' a being without a mind.
In my ignorance I thought that when women left their husbands to follow
other men, they were, rightly or wrongly, using their own minds, acting
on their own responsibility and on their own good or bad judgment.

In other words, I thought that they were thinking beings.

When a man steals a horse, he takes him by the mane or the mouth and
pulls him away with him. He