We must remember the idea from which these women started, which was absolutely the reverse of that which now prevails. In these days women are careful not to generalise; they prefer to personalise everything—medicine in the doctor, religion in the priest, the family in the husband, love in the lover. The women of the sixteenth century, we cannot repeat too often, had an ardent faith in things, but none at all in men; they had no intention whatever of being in bondage to a man, whoever he was, but preferred to go straight to the idea, and then to make its interpreter their apostle, or what they pleased. They were in love with love, but were unquestionably prone to regard the lover as of secondary importance, or at the most as the minister of their cult, not their master. Trustfulness and self-surrender struck them as delightful, desirable, religious, almost necessary, when based on a broad principle of liberty, and when they furnished a goal at which the affections might aim. We must insist also on another most important consideration, which the reader will already have suspected. These ladies did not labour for their personal happiness; in most cases they had no hope of ever attaining it. They discovered a means of giving life to others, but lacked it for themselves; they had known either too much or too little of existence. They were dissatisfied—out of conceit—with everything, perhaps with themselves; they had been mothers, and were yet maids. For the soul, like the body, needs to give itself, and on this condition depends its life and fruitfulness. Now many of these women had shadowy and inscrutable souls—souls whose pages no one had troubled to turn; they smothered their feelings, but they had suffered much, and still suffered. Hitherto they had given only their body, the poorest part of them, the contaminated part, the part that is lost in the giving; while the soul is ennobled and purified by self-surrender. They had perforce to cut themselves in two, and as maidens to look on at the ruin of one part of themselves, and nothing was more painful than this cleavage; philosophers even maintained that it was an impossible one, and that, when a woman yielded her body, under obligation or necessity, sometimes with disgust, she gave nothing, but remained immaculately a virgin, because the true virginity is that of the heart. Indeed, a favourite idea of that time was that whatever vicissitudes the bodily mechanism might undergo, only the soul could endorse them.