tinguishes
your complacent love, of the poetry which is the natural result when
souls and pleasures are in accord. Like a timid bird, just startled by
the report of a gun which has ceased, she puts her head out of her nest,
looks round her, and sees the world; and knowing the word of a charade
which you have played, she feels instinctively the void which exists in
your languishing passion. She divines that it is only with a lover that
she can regain the delightful exercise of her free will in love.

You have dried the green wood in preparation for a fire.

In the situation in which both of you find yourselves, there is no
woman, even the most virtuous, who would not be found worthy of a
_grande passion_, who has not dreamed of it, and who does not believe
that it is easily kindled, for there is always found a certain
_amour-propre_ ready to reinforce that conquered enemy--a jaded wife.

"If the role of an honest woman were nothing more than perilous,"
said an old lady to me, "I would admit that it would serve. But it is
tiresome; and I have never met a virtuous woman who did not think about
deceiving somebody."

And then, before any lover presents himself, a wife discusses with
herself the legality of the act; she enters into a conflict with her
duties, with the law, with religion and with the secret desires of a
nature which knows no check-rein excepting that which she places upon
herself. And then commences for you a condition of affairs totally
new; then you receive the first intimation which nature, that good and
indulgent mother, always gives to the creatures who are exposed to any
danger. Nature has put a bell on the neck of the Minotaur, as on the
tail of that frightful snake which is the terror of travelers. And then
appear in your wife what we will call the first symptoms, and woe to
him who does not know how to contend with them. Those who in reading our
book will remember that they saw those symptoms in their own domestic
life can pass to the conclusion of this work, where they will find how
they may gain consolation.

The situation referred to, in which a married couple bind themselves for
a longer or a shorter time, is the point from which our work starts,
as it is the end at which our observations stop. A man of intelligence
should know how to recognize the mysterious indications, the obscure
signs and the involuntary revelation which a wife unwittingly exhibits;
for the next Meditation will doubtless