Women often fancy themselves to be in love when they are not. Their natural passion for being beloved, their unwillingness to give a denial, the excitement of mind produced by an affair of gallantry, all these make them imagine they are in love when they are in fact only coquetting. All women are flirts. Some are restrained by timidity and some by reason. The greatest miracle of love is the reformation of a coquette. A coquette pretends to be jealous of her lover, in order to conceal her envy of other women. Most women yield more from weakness than from passion, hence an enterprising man usually succeeds with them better than an amiable man. It is harder for women to overcome their coquetry than their love. No woman knows how much of a coquette she is. Women who are in love more readily forgive great indiscretions than small infidelities. Some people are so full of themselves that even when they become lovers they find a way of being occupied with their passion without being interested in the person whom they love. It is useless to be young without being beautiful, or beautiful without being young. In their first love affairs women love their lover; in all others they love love. In the old age of love, as in the old age of life, we continue to live to pain long after we have ceased to live to pleasure. There is no passion in which self-love reigns so powerfully as in love; we are always more ready to sacrifice the repose of a person we love than to lose our own. There is a certain kind of love which, as it grows excessive, leaves no room for jealousy. Jealousy is born with love, but it does not always die with it. Jealousy is the greatest of all afflictions, and that which least excites pity in the persons that cause it. In love and in friendship we are often happier by reason of the things that we do not know than by those that we do. There are few women whose merit lasts longer than their beauty. The reason why most women are little touched by friendship is that friendship is insipid to those who have felt what love is. _II.--Friendship_ In the misfortunes of our best friends we always find something that does not displease us. Rare as true love is, it is less rare than true friendship. What makes us so changing in our friendships is that it is difficult to discern the qualities of the soul, and easy to recognize the qualities of the mind. It is equally difficult to have a friendship for those whom we do not esteem as for those we esteem more than ourselves. We love those who admire us, not those whom we admire. Most of the friendships of the world ill deserve the name of friendship; still, a man may make occasional use of them, as in a business where the profits are uncertain and it is usual to be cheated. It is more dishonourable to mistrust a friend than to be deceived by him.