Second Part Chapter 52

To a woman what can be sweeter than to see
passion ever held in check by tenderness, and the man who is her
master stayed, like a timid suitor, by a word from her, within the
limits that she chooses?

You asked me to describe him; but, Renee, it is not possible to make a
portrait of the man we love. How could the heart be kept out of the
work? B

esides, to be frank between ourselves, we may admit that one of
the dire effects of civilization on our manners is to make of man in
society a being so utterly different from the natural man of strong
feeling, that sometimes not a single point of likeness can be found
between these two aspects of the same person. The man who falls into
the most graceful operatic poses, as he pours sweet nothings into your
ear by the fire at night, may be entirely destitute of those more
intimate charms which a woman values.

On the other hand, an ugly, boorish, badly-dressed figure may mark a man
endowed with the very genius of love, and who has a perfect mastery over situations which
might baffle us with our superficial graces. A man whose conventional
aspect accords with his real nature, who, in the intimacy of wedded
love, possesses that inborn grace which can be neither given nor
acquired, but which Greek art has embodied in statuary, that careless
innocence of the ancient poets which, even in frank undress, seems to
clothe the soul as with a veil of modesty--this is our ideal, born of
our own conceptions, and linked with the universal harmony which seems
to be the reality underlying all created things. To find this ideal in
life is the problem which haunts the imagination of every woman--in
Gaston I have found it.