But there is another powerful reason for which the duties of love are differently distributed between man and woman. Man, by the special mission which his sex imposes on him, is a sudden aggressor and has organic necessities which are unknown to woman, and which he can satisfy with the rapidity of lightning. Without losing his love, he may have a caprice more fleeting than the lightning flash, and which, once vanished, leaves behind not even a pinch of ashes. I neither praise nor justify these sudden surprises of the senses, these passing infidelities; but I describe them because I find them frequently in the aggressive and petulant nature of the virile sex. Woman, instead, must defend herself. Man loses a great part of energy in the tooth that bites and in the claws that firmly hold the prey. Woman draws in her horns, like the snail does in the spires of its labyrinth, and, languidly and voluptuously concealed in the foam of her shell of love, allows herself to be caressed. She loses nothing in the struggle for conquest, and she is wholly consumed in the delights of letting herself be loved. Woman also may have caprices of the senses, but they are light clouds which no sooner appear than they are dissolved in the deep azure of the skies, and do not become ardent desires until the human claws press and condense them. Woman is silent even when she desires. Very weak in the attack, she is formidable in the defense, and has in herself so much energy as to stop and disarm a legion of combatants. With much shrewdness she defends her weakness every day, telling us that seductions wage war upon her from all quarters, while we are the first to seek the opportunities of sin. This is one of the most insidious sophisms, but it is also one of the weakest arguments of defense. Man attacks and assails simply because he is a man and could not wait for the seductions to come to him without condemning himself to be a eunuch and without inverting the most elementary and most inexorable laws of nature. Nor would a woman commit less of a sacrilege in turning from the defensive to the offensive, profaning her sex and violating nature in that which it holds most sacred and immutable.