Very generally that passion
is terror, but when it is not, it is almost impossible to
calculate the consequences which may follow. When the whole being
is dominated by love and by the greatest anxiety for the safety of
the person loved, the weakest woman will do deeds which might make
a brave man blush for his courage. This was precisely Faustina's
case.
If any man says that he understands women he is convicted of folly
by his own speech, seeing that they are altogether
incomprehensible. Of men, it may be sufficient for general
purposes to say with David that they are all liars, even though we
allow that they may be all curable of the vice of falsehood. Of
women, however, there is no general statement which is true. The
one is brave to heroism, the next cowardly in a degree
fantastically comic. The one is honest, the other faithless; the
one contemptible in her narrowness of soul, the next supremely
noble in broad truth as the angels in heaven; the one trustful,
the other suspicious; this one gentle as a dove, that one grasping
and venomous as a strong serpent. The hearts of women are as the
streets of a great town--some broad and straight and clean; some
dim and narrow and winding; or as the edifices and buildings of
that same city, wherein there are holy temples, at which men
worship in calm and peace, and dens where men gamble away the
souls given them by God against the living death they call
pleasure, which is doled out to them by the devil; in which there
are quiet dwellings, and noisy places of public gathering, fair
palaces and loathsome charnel-houses, where the dead are heaped
together, even as our dead sins lie ghastly and unburied in that
dark chamber of the soul, whose gates open of their own selves and
shall not be sealed while there is life in us to suffer.
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