"When a man's virtues are depicted for us, they are represented in the effort of action; but those which are admired in a woman always infer a model as motionless as a beautiful statue in a marble gallery. She is an inconsistent image, a tissue of vices quiescent, of inert qualities, of slumbering epithets, of passive movements, of negative forces. She is chaste because she has no senses, she is kind because she does harm to none, she is just because she does not act, she is patient and resigned because she is devoid of energy, she is indulgent because none offends her or forgiving because she has not the courage to resist, she is charitable because she allows herself to be stripped or because her charity deprives her of nothing, she is faithful, she is loyal, she is submissive, she is devoted because all these virtues can live in emptiness and can blossom on a dead woman's body. But what shall happen if the image takes life and comes forth from her retreat to enter upon an existence in which all that does not take part in the movement that surrounds it becomes a pitiful or dangerous wreck? Is it still a virtue to keep faithful to an ill-chosen or morally extinguished love, or to remain subject to an unintelligent or unjust master? Is to refrain from harming enough to make one kind, to refrain from lying enough to make one true? There is the morality of those who keep to the banks of the great river and the morality of those who ascend the stream. There is the morality of sleep and that of action, the morality of shadow and that of light; and the virtues of the first, which may be described as concave virtues, must needs arise, stand up and become virtues in relief, if they are to remain virtues in the second. The matter and the lines perhaps remain identical, but the values are exactly reversed. Patience, mildness, submissiveness, confidence, renunciation, resignation, devotion, sacrifice, all fruits of passive goodness, become, if we remove them, such as they are, into the stern outer life, no more than weakness, servility, indifference, unconsciousness, indolence, unconstraint, folly or cowardice and must, in order to keep at the necessary level the source of goodness from which they spring, be able to develop into energy, firmness, obstinacy, prudence, indignation and revolt. Loyalty, which has scarce anything to fear so long as it does not stir, must be careful lest it be duped and surrender its arms to the enemy. Chastity, which sat waiting with eyes closed and hands folded, has the right to change into passion, which shall decide and settle destiny. And the same consecutively with all the virtues which have a name as with those which are as yet unnamed. Next, it is a problem to know which is preferable, active or passive life, that which mingles with men and events or that which shuns them. Is there a moral law that imposes the one or the other, or has each the right to make