ve's service asked
no payment, and was its own guerdon. And I, being innocent in such
matters, and, foolish that I was, holding the ways of women as of small
account, read her sayings in the sense that her services to the cause
of Khem, which she loved, brought with them their own reward. But when
I praised so fine a spirit, she burst into angry tears and left me
wondering. For I knew nothing of the trouble at her heart. I knew not
then that, unsought, this woman had given me her love, and that she was
rent and torn by pangs of passion fixed like arrows in her breast. I did
not know--how should I know it, who never looked upon her otherwise than
as an instrument of our joint and holy cause? Her beauty never stirred
me--no, not even when she leaned over me and breathed upon my hair, I
never thought of it otherwise than as a man thinks of the beauty of a
statue. What had I to do with such delights, I who was sworn to Isis
and dedicate to the cause of Egypt? O ye Gods, bear me witness that I am
innocent of this thing which was the source of all my woe and the woe of
Khem!

How strange a thing is this love of woman, that is so small in its
beginning and in its ends so great! See, at the first it is as the
little spring of water welling from a mountain's heart. And at the last
what is it? It is a mighty river that floats argosies of joy and makes
wide lands to smile. Or, perchance, it is a torrent to wash in a flood
of ruin across the fields of Hope, bursting in the barriers of design,
and bringing to tumbled nothingness the tenement of man's purity and the
temples of his faith. For when the Invisible conceived the order of the
universe He set this seed of woman's love within its plan, that by its
most unequal growth is doomed to bring about equality of law. For now
it lifts the low to heights untold, and now it brings the noble to the
level of the dust. And thus, while Woman, that great surprise of nature,
is, Good and Evil can never grow apart. For still She stands, and, blind
with love, shoots the shuttle of our fate, and pours sweet water into
the cup of bitterness, and poisons the wholesome breath of life with the
doom of her desire. Turn this way and turn that, She is at hand to meet
thee. Her weakness is thy strength, her might is thy undoing. Of her
thou art, to her thou goest. She is thy slave, yet holds thee captive;
at her touch honour withers, locks open, and barriers fall. She is
infinite as ocean, she is variab