critics may have to say concerning small details, this story still
remains the strangest love story of which the world has any
record.





ABELARD AND HELOISE

Many a woman, amid the transports of passionate and languishing
love, has cried out in a sort of ecstasy:

"I love you as no woman ever loved a man before!"

When she says this she believes it. Her whole soul is aflame with
the ardor of emotion. It really seems to her that no one ever
could have loved so much as she.

This cry--spontaneous, untaught, sincere--has become almost one
of those conventionalities of amorous expression which belong to
the vocabulary of self-abandonment. Every woman who utters it,
when torn by the almost terrible extravagance of a great love,
believes that no one before her has ever said it, and that in her
own case it is absolutely true.

Yet, how many women are really faithful to the end? Very many,
indeed, if circumstances admit of easy faithfulness. A high-
souled, generous, ardent nature will endure an infinity of
disillusionment, of misfortune, of neglect, and even of ill