nversation, but my disposition breaks through everything in spite of
me. I feel a fit of philosophy upon me again to-day, and I must ask
you to prepare to endure the broadside of morality I am making ready
to give you. Hereafter, I promise you more gayety. So now to answer
your letter.

No, I will not take back anything. You may make war on me as much as
it please you, because of the bad opinion of my sex I expressed in my
last letter. Is it my fault if I am furnished with disagreeable truths
to utter? Besides, do you not know, Marquis, that the being on earth
who thinks the most evil of women, is a woman?

I wish, however, very seriously, to justify the ideas, to my manner of
expressing which you have taken an exception. I am neither envious nor
unjust. Because I happened to mention my own sex rather than yours,
you must not imagine that it is my intention to underrate women. I
hoped to make you understand that, without being more culpable than
men, they are more dangerous because they are accustomed more
successfully to hide their sentiments. In effect, you will confess the
object of your love sooner than they will acknowledge theirs. However,
when they assure you that their affection for you has no other source
than a knowledge of your merit and of your good qualities, I am
persuaded that they are sincere. I do not even doubt that when they
realize that their style of thought is becoming less refined, they do
everything in their power to hide the fact from themselves. But the
motives, about which I have been telling you, are in the bottom of
their hearts just the same. They are none the less the true causes of
the liking they have for you, and whatever efforts they may make to
persuade themselves that the causes are wholly spiritual, their desire
changes nothing in the nature of things. They hide this deformity with
as much care as they would conceal teeth that might disfigure an
otherwise perfect face. In such case, even when alone they would be
afraid to open their mouth, and so, by force of habit in hiding this
defect from others as well as from themselves, they succeed in
forgetting all about it or in considering that it is not much of a
defect.

I agree with you that you would lose too much if men and women were to
show themselves in their true colors. The world has agreed to play a
comedy, and to show real, natural sentiments would not be acting, it
would be substituting the real character for the one it has