First Part Chapter 15

We are each developing in strange ways. A large dose of philosophy to
a grain of love is your recipe; a large dose of love to a grain of
philosophy is mine. Why, Rousseau's Julie, whom I thought so learned,
is a mere beginner to you. Woman's virtue, quotha! How you have
weighed up life! Alas! I make fun of you, and, after all, perhaps you
are right.

In one day you have made a holocaust of your youth and become a miser
before your time. Your Louis will be happy, I daresay. If he loves
you, of which I make no doubt, he will never find out, that, for the
sake of your family, you are acting as a courtesan does for money; and
certainly men seem to find happiness with them, judging by the
fortunes they squander thus. A keen-sighted husband might no doubt
remain in love with you, but what sort of gratitude could he feel in
the long run for a woman who had made of duplicity a sort of moral
armor, as indispensable as her stays?

Love, dear, is in my eyes the first principle of all the virtues,
conformed to the divine likeness. Like all other first principles, it
is not a matter of arithmetic; it is the Infinite in us. I cannot but
think you have been trying to justify in your own eyes the frightful
position of a girl, married to a man for whom she feels nothing more
than esteem. You prate of duty, and make it your rule and measure; but
surely to take necessity as the spring of action is the moral theory
of atheism? To follow the impulse of love and feeling is the secret
law of every woman's heart. You are acting a man's part, and your
Louis will have to play the woman!