First Part Chapter 15

LOUISE DE CHAULIEU TO MME. DE L'ESTORADE
March.

Ah! my love, marriage is making a philosopher of you! Your darling
face must, indeed, have been jaundiced when you wrote me those
terrible views of human life and the duty of women. Do you fancy you
will convert me to matrimony by your programme of subterranean labors?

Alas! is this then the outcome for you of our too-instructed dreams!
We left Blois all innocent, armed with the pointed shafts of
meditation, and, lo! the weapons of that purely ideal experience have
turned against your own breast! If I did not know you for the purest
and most angelic of created beings, I declare I should say that your
calculations smack of vice. What, my dear, in the interest of your
country home, you submit your pleasures to a periodic thinning, as you
do your timber.

Oh! rather let me perish in all the violence of the
heart's storms than live in the arid atmosphere of your cautious
arithmetic! As girls, we were both unusually enlightened, because of the large
amount of study we gave to our chosen subjects; but, my child,
philosophy without love, or disguised under a sham love, is the most
hideous of conjugal hypocrisies. I should imagine that even the
biggest of fools might detect now and again the owl of wisdom
squatting in your bower of roses--a ghastly phantom sufficient to put
to flight the most promising of passions. You make your own fate,
instead of waiting, a plaything in its hands.