The "Lofty Moral World" in Which Women Live

February 17, 2007

Here's an appropriate excerpt from War and Peace for Valentine's Day. Over the years, I've heard many a man (myself included) describe his wife this way:

If Nikolai could have been conscious of his feeling, he would have found that his firm, tender, and proud love for his wife had always been based on this feeling of wonder before her inner life, before that lofty moral world, almost inaccessible to him, in which his wife lived always.   

He was proud that she was so intelligent and good, being conscious of his own insignificance before her in the spiritual world, and rejoiced the more that she, with her soul … made up a part of him.