n why did you rush away when I wanted to bring you together?"

"Are you crazy, Amedee? I could go from Paris to Rome disguised as a
valet; I would do the most unreasonable thing for your sake; but how can
you expect me to speak to a woman on the public roads who has never
been presented to me,--and who, besides, would have preached me a sermon
under three heads? I speak to peasants, and if I am hungry I would ask a
workman to share his bread with me and pay him in guineas,--that is all
proper enough; but to stop a carriage on the highway, like the gentlemen
of the road in England, is not at all within my code of manners. You
poor child, you know only how to love; you don't know how to live.
Besides, I am not like you as yet, dear angel; I don't like morality.
Still, I am capable of great efforts to please you. Yes, I will go to
work; I will learn how to preach; you shall have no more kisses without
verses of the Bible interlarded."

She used her power and abused it as soon as she saw in my eyes the
ardent expression which was always there when she began her sorceries.
She triumphed over everything, and I complacently told myself that the
woman who loses all, sacrifices the future, and makes love her only
virtue, is far above Catholic polemics.

"So she loves herself better than she loves you?" Arabella went on. "She
sets something that is not you above you. Is that love? how can we women
find anything to value in ourselves except that which you value in us?
No woman, no matter how fine a moralist she may be, is the equal of a
man. Tread upon us, kill us; never embarrass your lives on our account.
It is for us to die, for you to live, great and honored. For us the
dagger in your hand; for you our pardoning love. Does the sun think of
the gnats in his beams, that live by his light? they stay as long as
they can and when he withdraws his face they die--"

"Or fly somewhere else," I said interrupting her.

"Yes, somewhere else," she replied, with an indifference that would have
piqued any man into using the power with which she invested him. "Do
you really think it is worthy of womanhood to make a man eat his bread
buttered with virtue, and to persuade him that religion is incompatible
with love? Am I a reprobate? A woman either gives herself or she
refuses. But to refuse and moralize is a double wrong, and is contrary
to the rule of the right in all lands. Here, you will get only excellent
sandwiches prepared by the ha