book, and looked at it.

I was enraptured and at the same time filled with a strange fear by
the cold coquetry with which this magnificent woman draped her charms
in her furs of dark sable; by the severity and hardness which lay in
this cold marble-like face. Again I took my pen in hand, and wrote
the following words:

"To love, to be loved, what happiness! And yet how the glamour of
this pales in comparison with the tormenting bliss of worshipping a
woman who makes a plaything out of us, of being the slave of a
beautiful tyrant who treads us pitilessly underfoot. Even Samson, the
hero, the giant, again put himself into the hands of Delilah, even
after she had betrayed him, and again she betrayed him, and the
Philistines bound him and put out his eyes which until the very end
he kept fixed, drunken with rage and love, upon the beautiful
betrayer."

I was breakfasting in my honey-suckle arbor, and reading in the Book
of Judith. I envied the hero Holofernes because of the regal woman
who cut off his head with a sword, and because of his beautiful
sanguinary end.

"The almighty Lord hath struck him, and hath delivered him into the
hands of a woman."

This sentence strangely impressed me.

How ungallant these Jews are, I thought. And their God might choose
more becoming expressions when he speaks of the fair sex.