This
false devotion exhibits itself, first of all in the shape of pretty
books of devotion in a costly binding, by the aid of which these dear
sinners attempt in vain to fulfill the duties imposed by religion, and
long neglected for the pleasures of marriage.
Now here we will lay down a principle, and you must engrave it on your
memory in letters of fire.
When a young woman suddenly takes up religious practices which she has
before abandoned, this new order of life always conceals a motive
highly significant, in view of her husband's happiness. In the case of
at least seventy-nine women out of a hundred this return to God proves
that they have been inconsistent, or that they intend to become so.
But a symptom more significant still and more decisive, and one that
every husband should recognize under pain of being considered a fool,
is this:
At the time when both of you are immersed in the illusive delights of
the honeymoon, your wife, as one devoted to you, would constantly
carry out your will. She was happy in the power of showing the ready
will, which both of you mistook for love, and she would have liked for
you to have asked her to walk on the edge of the roof, and
immediately, nimble as a squirrel, she would have run over the tiles.
In a word, she found an ineffable delight in sacrificing to you that
_ego_ which made her a being distinct from yours.
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