I cannot even understand how any one can accept a principle, however hallowed by ages, without looking at it from both sides, pulling it to pieces, into shreds and atoms, until it crumbles into dust and cannot be put together any more.

Aniela cannot understand that a principle once considered good, hallowed by religion, as well as by public opinion, could be considered otherwise than as a sacred duty.

It does not matter to me whether she is conscious of it, or it is instinctive impulse reasoned out by her intelligence, or merely acquired; it is enough that it has entered her very nature.

I had a glimpse of it the other day when I spoke about Pani Korytzka’s divorce suit:  “You can prove everything, and yet when one does wrong conscience tells us:  ‘It is wrong, it is wrong!’” I did not then attach the importance to these words that belonged to them.  In Aniela there is no wavering, no doubt whatever.  Her soul winnows the chaff from the grain with such precision that there can be no question about its purity.  She does not try to find her own norma, but takes it ready-made from religion, general moral principles, and clings to them so strongly that they become her very own, for they permeate her system.  The simpler the differential quality of good and evil, the more absolute and merciless it grows.  In this ethical code there are no extenuating circumstances.  As according to it the wife belongs to her husband, she who gives herself to another does wrong.  There are no discussions, no considerations, or reflections,—­there is the right hand for the righteous, the left for the sinners, God’s mercy above all,—­but nothing between, no intermediate place.

It is the code of the honest villager, so simple that people like me do not understand it.  It seems to us that human life and human souls are too complex to find room in it.  Unfortunately we have not found anything to replace it, and consequently we flutter here and there like stray birds, in loneliness and alarm.

The greater part of our women still hold fast to that code.  Even those who occasionally stray from it do not permit themselves a momentary doubt as to its truth and sacredness.  Where it begins, reasoning leaves off.

The poets erroneously represent woman as an enigma, a living Sphinx.  Man is a hundred times more of an enigma and a Sphinx.  A healthy woman that is not hysterical may be either good or bad, strong or weak, but she has more spiritual simplicity than man.  Forever and all times the Ten Commandments are enough for her, whether she live according to their tenets, or through human frailty set them aside.

The female soul is so dogmatic that I have known a woman whose very atheism took the form of religion.

It is strange that this code of the honest villager does not exclude in women either keen intelligence, a subtle mind, or loftiness of ideas.  Their soul seems to have something of the humming-bird which flits in and out the thickest shrubs, without getting entangled in their branches, or touching a single leaf.