The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne Chapter 26 Page 6

“There are no new truths, much as we have prided ourselves on finding some. A moral? Why, this: That, in the battlefield of life, the downright stroke, that would fall only on a man’s steel headpiece, is sure to light on a woman’s heart, over which she wears no breastplate, and whose wisdom it is, therefore, to keep out of the conflict.

Or, this: That the whole universe, her own sex and yours, and Providence, or Destiny, to boot, make common cause against the woman who swerves one hair’s-breadth out of the beaten track. Yes; and add (for I may as well own it, now) that, with that one hair’s-breadth, she goes all astray, and never sees the world in its true aspect afterwards.”

“This last is too stern a moral,” I observed. “Cannot we soften it a little?”