That women should marry while virgin

Under the heavy shawl of tropical night (embroidered densely with the clanging thread of cicadas) an older man and a young woman sat clapped in intense conversation.

He told her how it is when we had had that special lover, lost her, and then spend the rest of our life looking -- in vain -- to find another who could equal her.

How sad, she said, and, in return, she told him what she thought was a similar story: about that intense feeling of being alive which her first lover had given her -- and none has since; and how very nearly she came to throwing over everything she had when, after some years' absence, he suddenly turned up again; nearly thrown it all up for the sake of the memory of that special feeling.

This made him remember that his special she had once said the same thing -- used the same words, in fact -- "you make me feel intensely alive"; and that she, too, had been, on their first time, a virgin. He then remembered that, more broadly, all his virgins have loved him madly and forever afterwords; have been like putty in his hands; would have done for him anything he'd ever asked; and that all have remained intensely loyal to him, long after he'd left them.

And remembering this, he understood suddenly, and then most eruditely quoted the words of the very great womanizer specialist, Tanizaki, that there is no love like the love of a virgin; and seeing his interlocutor's face turn pale at these words, in a flash he understood it all and burst out: "Perhaps that is why the ancients recommended that a woman remain a virgin until she marry?"

"Perhaps yes", she said, in that quiet, barely perceptible voice in which important truths are sometimes spoken; and the quiet of the voice was confirmed by the intensity of the brief flash in her blue eye.

Such brief flashes are the stuff of life, rarer than nickel, more precious than uranium; and if there has been a gain in the quality of life of middle-aged men as a result of the last hundred years of change in European customs regulating the mutual conduct of them and young, beautiful women, it is this: Don Fabrizio could never have seen such a flash in Angelica's eye.

But then, he was able to waltz with her, so there has been a loss, too; and who knows who was the better off.