To fail in such an end--to lose the
grasp of it when once it might have been hers--this is the most bitter
of aloes; gall that eats into her blood and corrodes her clearest
vision. A man, forging destinies, is a king, to be mated only with
a woman who loves.
There are exceptions; but these are not needed to prove the rule;
for there hangs even some doubt, like a fly in the amber, in the
history of Jeanne D'Arc, the most patent an example of them all. Yet
whether, as some chronicles would say, she was never burnt as a witch,
but smuggled into the country, and there mated in love--and it would
seem a shame unpardonable to rob history of a great martyr and the
Church of Rome of a saint--it makes no odds in the counting. Great
women have loved greatly--lesser women have loved less--but all who
are of the sex have made the heart their master, and obeyed it
whenever it has truly called.
So it had come to Sally. Beyond all doubt, she loved; beyond all
question, she was prepared to obey the faintest call that her heart
prompted. Janet, tender to her that night, fondling her and caressing
her, answering to her with the very heart that she had tried to stifle
within herself, was Janet herself again the next morning.
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