And you, mothers, who were virgins, when you teach your daughters what a treasure virginal purity is, give them, together with a lesson of anatomy and physiology, which perhaps they need, a lesson of high morals. Tell them that to the man they love they should give everything; to the man they do not love, nothing; tell them that a woman can be physically a virgin and a prostitute morally; tell them that to the first kiss they owe all their treasures untouched, not one gem only, and that the future of their love will depend on the preservation of the centuple virginity enclosed in the one virgin as the masses conceive her. If nature, with a sad mystery, has prescribed that woman should love her first love with much pain, it is incumbent on us to crown the virgin with so many flowers of virtue, to scent her with so many perfumes of grace, as to turn a martyr into a happy spouse. It is our task to elevate the physical virgin to a very high region of purity and grandeur, so that she may appear to us like an angel of Beato Angelico, all illumined by the iridescent light of the rainbow, where, amidst tears of a first defeat, should shine the light of the sun of love; and that after the hurricane of conquest there may be announced the bright calm of a day all beauty and delight. The Christian religion, in offering to man a virgin-mother to worship, wished, perhaps, to consecrate the purity of the virgin with the affections of the bride; to create an ideal of perfection in which the two chief virtues of woman should shine; to suggest, perhaps, that one can be a virgin and a mother, as another can be a virgin and a courtesan. That this ideal creature has been a sublime creation of the human mind, and not a riddle or a myth, will be clearly proved by the influence which she has exercised upon Christian art, by gazing at the Madonnas of Raphael, of Murillo and of Correggio. CHAPTER VI CONQUEST AND VOLUPTUOUSNESS