"I do not remember," he made answer wearily, "that I loved your aunt.
Yet we were wed, and through habit came to love each other and to be
happy together."

"I can understand that Monna Elizabetta should have come to love you,"
she returned. "You are not as Gian Maria. You were not fat and ugly,
stupid and cruel, as is he."

It was an appeal that might have won its way to a man's heart through the
ever-ready channel of his vanity. But it did not so with Guidobaldo. He
only shook his head.

"The matter is not one that I will argue. It were unworthy in us both.
Princes, my child, are not as ordinary folk."

"In what are they different?" she flashed back at him. "Do they not
hunger and thirst as ordinary folk? Are they not subject to the same
ills; do they not experience the same joys? Are they not born, and do
they not die, just as ordinary folk? In what, then, lies this difference
that forbids them to mate as ordinary folk?"

Guidobaldo tossed his arms to Heaven, his eyes full of a consternation
that clearly defied utterance. The violence of his gesture drew a gasp
of pain from him. At last, when he had mastered it:

"They are different," said he, "in that their lives are not their own to
dispose of as they will. They belong to the State which they were born
to govern, and in nothing else does this become of so much importance as
in their mating. It behoves them to contract such alliances as shall