A letter is a soul, so faithful an echo of the speaking voice that to the sensitive it is among the richest treasures of love.

A deist is an atheist with an eye cocked for the off-chance of some advantage.

To speak of love is to make love.

The woman who is about to deceive her husband always carefully thinks out how she is going to act, but she is never logical.

A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.

At thirty years a woman asks her lover to give her back the esteem she has forfeited for his sake; she lives only for him, her thoughts are full of his future, he must have a great career, she bids him make it glorious; she can obey, entreat, command, humble herself, or rise in pride; times without number she brings comfort when a young girl can only make moan.

There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step.