shepherdess Marcella, who, all unguarded, roved the mountains and was
by all the shepherds adored. Like Marcella, she had given her heart to
no man, had preferred none. Youths were reputed to have died for love
of her, as Chrysostom died for love of the shepherdess; and she, like
the shepherdess, had shed no tear. When Chrysostom was lying on his
bier in the valley, and Marcella looked down from the high rock,
Ambrosio, the dead man's comrade, cried out on her, upbraiding her
with bitter words--"Oh basilisk of our mountains!" Nor do I think
Ambrosio spoke too strongly. Marcella cared nothing for men's
admiration, and yet, instead of retiring to one of those nunneries
which are founded for her kind, she chose to rove the mountains,
causing despair to all the shepherds. Zuleika, with her peculiar
temperament, would have gone mad in a nunnery. "But," you may argue,
"ought not she to have taken the veil, even at the cost of her reason,
rather than cause so much despair in the world? If Marcella was a
basilisk, as you seem to think, how about Miss Dobson?" Ah, but
Marcella knew quite well, boasted even, that she never would or could
love any man. Zuleika, on the other hand, was a woman of really
passionate fibre. She may not have had that conscious, separate, and
quite explicit desire to be a mother with which modern playwrights
credit every unmated member of her sex. But she did know that she
could love. And, surely, no woman who knows that of herself can be
rightly censured for not recluding herself from the world: it is only
women without the power to love who have no right to provoke men's
love.

Though Zuleika had never given her heart, strong in her were the
desire and the need that it should be given. Whithersoever she had
fared, she had seen nothing but youths fatuously prostrate to her--not
one upright figure which she could respect. There were the middle-aged