Further, reading is a duty having special claims on women. Not only is there always some new thing to learn, some new chord to touch, but the intellectual life demands a constant outgoing of energy,—I will venture to say, a continual “education.” Could a tree flourish and bear fruit if it refused to suck up its sap? How long would it be before it stood a bare skeleton against the sky? Thus, with complete independence of mind, as great as her material liberty but much more difficult to acquire, a woman will supply herself with spiritual food; she will seek Beauty in truth stripped of all conventions. The real foe to women’s freedom is not this or that man, but themselves, because of their frivolity, their inconsequence, and their innate passion for the superficial; in other words, for the conventional or fashionable. They need a real force of soul to go deeply into anything; they are perfectly happy in yielding to the glitter of a thought which, though obscure at bottom, is dazzling on the surface. When the taste for precision has not been carefully instilled into them in childhood, they run a great risk of wasting their minds in habits of cursory curiosity, like many men of the world. Books played a prominent part in the psychology of the Renaissance. They were regarded as the highest type of luxury; a house was characterised as much by its library as by its plate. Among the ladies, Anne of Brittany, Louise of Savoy, and many others are essentially deserving of the name of bibliophiles, nobly loving the beautiful books with beautiful miniatures produced for them. They were even accused of reading them. In that epoch, the artistic aroma exhaled from a fine edition seemed necessarily to accentuate the written thought, just as music accentuated the uttered thought. We have become wiser; we have discovered that beautiful books are herbariums in which ideas must be left to dry, for their better preservation. There was no lack of scoffers to make mock of this “bookish sufficiency.” “What a heap of books!... These folk must surely mean to carry the world on their backs! What a frittering away of intellectuality!” And, indeed, Margaret of France not only believed in books, but doted on them; to her a library seemed a sanctuary. “Tant y en a que le seul remembrer Et les nommer n’est pas en ma puissance, Mais il faisoit beau voir leur ordonnance ... Et du scavoir qui est dedans J’en laisse aux folz craindre les accidens ... Des livres fiz ung pillier, et sembloit Que sa grandeur terre et ciel assembloit.”[228] We writers think it natural enough that people should buy our books, keep them, and even cut a few pages; if it is women who show us this attention, we do not complain. We dig away in darkness under the soil, labouring like a miner with his pick; why should we complain that above us, in the bright sunshine, someone sifts and mints our metal, and circulates part of it through the world?