Men and women vary so much in this, as in every other phase of feeling. The latter, when they do take the more generous view of their position—when they can bring themselves to choose “the better part,” accept it, I think, with a more complete abandonment of _pique_ than the former. Perhaps their pride is of a nobler order: no doubt their vanity is less egotistical than our own. With us, except in the highest natures—and these, as has been well remarked, have ever a leavening of the feminine element in their organisation—there is always something of irritation left after a wound of the affections has healed up—something that stints and rankles, and looks to reprisals of one kind or another for relief. I have read an old tale of chivalry so thoroughly exemplifying this state of feeling, and affording so natural an example of the changes and counterchanges with which gold and silver are staked against each other in the dangerous game, that I cannot forbear quoting it here. “A certain knight had long loved a damsel at the court of the King of France; but she, albeit accepting the service of none other, treated him with such coldness and _duresse_, that he at length obtained the title of the ‘Patient Knight,’ and she of the ‘Scornful Ladye.’ In vain he sat at her feet in hall; in vain wore her colours in the lists; in vain added to his cognisance the motto ‘_Sans espérance_,’ above the representation of a dungeon-grate, to signify the hopelessness of his captivity. She looked upon him coldly as the winter moon looks on a frozen lake; she turned from him pitilessly as the bending poplar turns from the south wind, whispering its longing and its sorrows, wooing her even with its tears. “So minstrels sang in their lays of his constancy, and knights marvelled at his subjection, and ladies pitied—it may be despised him also a little for his long-suffering: but still the ‘Patient Knight’ struck hard and shouted high for the renown of her he loved; and still the ‘Scornful Ladye’ accepted his homage, and took credit for his deeds-of-arms with scant courtesy, and cruel neglect, and high imperious disdain. “So the King bade his knights and nobles to a feast; and because there was to be a solemn passage-of-arms held on the morrow, he entertained them with a fight of wild beasts in the Carrousel, whereon lords and ladies looked down in safety from the galleries above. But many a soft cheek grew pale none the less, when a lion and a tiger were let loose to battle for their lives. “Now even while they glared on each other ere they closed, the ‘Scornful Ladye’ dropped her glove between the beasts of prey. Quoth she, with a mocking smile, ‘An I had a bachelor here who loved me well, he would fetch me back this glove that the wind hath blown from my hand.’