There is an absolute chastity imposed by the cruel laws of sects or of society, but this is not the place to speak of it. And there is another absolute chastity imposed by ambition, by a misinterpreted virtue, or even by egotism; a chastity which, at the bottom, is nothing else than self-idolatry, a rabid concentration of forces to reach lofty or insensate ends. The fruit which human voluptuousness reaps is, however, generally beneath its desire or expectation, and nature wreaks its vengeance in a thousand ways upon those who outrage it. In many cases, however, true, sincere chastity, imposed by an iron will, is an admirable thing, deserving a place among the rarest and most valuable things in a museum. Not one case in a hundred of those upon which history has bestowed veneration deserves the praises which are habitually offered to them, because many of these forms of chastity are false, or easy through impotency; they are, therefore, false virtues. Other chastities are as sterile as the sands of the desert, they are clouds that rise without shape and without aim in the imagination of the human heart, and vanish without leaving any trace. Be that as it may, they do not belong to the history of love, and to discuss them here would entitle the gentle reader to whisper in my ear a second time: "_Non est hic locus_." CHAPTER XIV LOVE IN SEX Man and woman can love with the same degree of force, but they will never love in the same manner, since to the altar of their passion they carry two greatly different natures beside their different genetic missions. As long as there shall live on our planet a man and a woman, they will eternally exchange and counterchange this innocent reproach: "Ah, you do not love me as I love you!" And the lament will be forever true, because woman will never love like man, and man will never be capable of loving like woman. In a complete essay on the comparative psychology of the two sexes we could delineate the distinctive characteristics of virile love and feminine love, and I may try it some day; be it sufficient for me here to sketch in a general way the two figures of passion, one in essence, but rendered so variform by the two different natures called Adam and Eve. Listen to two spontaneous cries, uttered by two nations very distant and well-nigh uncivilized, and you will find the first lines of a physiology of the sexual characters of love. The Munda-Kols of Chota Nagpur have some popular songs which express the psychical difference between man and woman. The women sing: "Singbonga from the beginning has made us smaller than you, therefore we obey you. Even if it were not so and from the beginning we had overburdened you with work, still we would not be your equals. To you God has given with two hands, to us with one; and for this we do not plough the ground." And the men sing to the women: