I reason everything out, and usually analyze my tastes too well to succumb to them blindly. And that's my chief defect, the real cause of my weakness… - Guy de Maupassant

Let them respect my convictions, and I will respect theirs!

For the first time, Duroy thought of all that was hidden in her past and began to speculate. Obviously she'd already had lovers, but what sort were they and what kind of society did they come from? A vague jealousy, a sort of hostility against her, stirred in him, an hostility directed against everything that he did not know about her, all that part of her feelings and life which did not belong to him. He looked at her, irritated by the secrets hidden in that pretty, silent little head, which perhaps at that very moment was thinking with regret of another man, of other men. How he would have liked to peer into her memories, explore them and learn all there was to know about them!

...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.