It was natural for women then to endeavour to preserve what once lost — was lost for ever, till this care swallowing up every other care, reputation for chastity, became the one thing needful to the sex.
A lover in ancient Greece, who offered sacrifice before this fair image, might forget easily that it was a goddess to whom he knelt, and see only an earthly maid fresh with youth and chastity and loveliness.
I did not understand this, and I thought that the honeymoon and all of my acts during that period were virtuous, and that to satisfy one's desires with his wife is an eminently chaste thing.
He tended to exclude novels that might be considered unchaste, but chased ones that could be padded out into three volumes—helping give rise to the triple-decker novel, which became a staple of Victorian literature.
And Emma, I think instinctively understands this, that what Greville wants from her isn't just sex, but also oddly the kind of almost the opposite kind of display of chastity and modesty.
Inwardly you condemn me for having had a part in it, and you fancy you defend the principle of chaste living when you do nothing except from the prompting of your passions.
His early biographer, Bayet, had pains to stress Descartes's upright character, claims that he lived a chaste life after this one lapse of sexual morality.