Women are so constituted as to understand this sharp antagonism between material love and spiritual love—women, who, at a certain crisis of life, feel so strongly the contrast between the cruelties and ironies of material things and the refinements of the heart. They drag about a body often feeble, suffering, wretched, a misshapen, bleeding, shamefast body, a pain-stricken body, born for love and worship, but subdued to the surgeon. There comes a time when they would fain forget the animal and wash it of its impurities if possible; their soul has become more intensely spiritual. If they shudder at the recollection of certain physical necessities, through that very fact the secret of happiness appears to them simpler, more luminous, less clogged with matter; branded by life, as certain mystics bore the brands of divine love, with sides pierced and limbs explored and broken by the hands of men, they are athirst for love, enthusiasm and worship, they understand that no intellectual hair-splitting, no doctrinal analysis, is worth a snatch of love. They know the sweetness of things. I will go farther: they know the extraordinary influence of moral forces on physical health; the body, like society at large, needs to be reinvigorated by soul and heart. The truth strikes upon them vividly by a sort of intuition. But it is far from being the case that all women are able to profit by it, because they have to reckon with a thousand practical obstacles: they require great liberty of mind and a large share of energy if they are to avoid being restrained by a host of more or less respectable prejudices, conventions, and usages. After all, timidity, indifference and frivolity are very natural things.