Her theory of love is peculiar enough. Love of course appears to her the corner-stone of the social edifice: in itself it is always good, only becoming bad by the use made of it. Margaret is eminently platonist in the sense that she proclaims the existence of two loves, a good and a bad; but to her the distinction between them is simplicity itself: the one is man’s love, the other, woman’s; men love with an evil, earthly love, women alone can love celestially. Sometimes they chance to allow themselves to be caught in the snares of men; let them flee then, for “briefest follies are always the best.” Thus loving is for women. The love of a woman, established firmly in God and on honour, the same love that Henri d’Albret styles “hypocrisy or covert malice,” forges a divine and holy chain. Margaret never tires of expatiating on the virtues of women’s love, a pure and ardent love, the instrument and the end of civilisation, the highest form of human activity, the prayer admirable beyond all other prayers that a living creature can address to the Creator. In the nineteenth tale of the _Heptameron_ she gives this love a very catholic definition, borrowed almost word for word from Castiglione: “I call perfect lovers those who seek some perfection, either goodness, beauty or grace, in the object of their love, those who incline always to virtue and have so lofty and refined a heart that, even at the price of death, they would not aim at base things that honour and conscience condemn. The soul was created but to return to the supreme good, and so long as it is encased in the body, it can only long and strive for holiness. But the sin of our first parent has rendered dark and sensual the senses, the soul’s inevitable intermediary; seeing only through them the visible objects which approach perfection, the soul hastens to find in outward beauty, in visible grace and the moral virtues, the sovereign beauty, grace, and virtue. It seeks them, and finds them not, and passes by; it essays to mount higher, like children who, as they grow bigger, must needs change their dolls. And when at length mature experience shows that neither perfection nor felicity is to be met with in this world, the soul pants after the great Author and the very source of the beautiful. But then may God open its eyes! otherwise it must speedily stray into the paths of false philosophy. For faith alone can reveal and bestow what is good, which carnal, natural man by himself never could attain.” Thus the worship of beauty is not necessarily mystical, but it is a true religion. We come from God, and we return to God through hope and love much more surely than through any sort of reasoning. The holy love of the beautiful, of perfection, purifies the soul better than any practical efforts, and little by little raises it to the ideal perception of perfect beauty. The soul then wings its flight towards God, sustained by faith above unfathomable abysses.