No man under Heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and… — Wilkie Collins

I confess I have often fancied myself transformed into some other person, and have felt a certian pleasure in seeing myself in my new chracter. One of our first amusements as children (if we have any imagination at all) is to get out of our own characters, and to try the characters of other personages as a change—to be fairies, to be queens, to be anything, in short, but what we really are.

The actions of human beings are not invariably governed by the laws of pure reason