In allowing the tiger to devour the courtier, the princess showed that her love was of the primitive, barbarous type, being in reality self-love, not other-love. She "loved" the man not for his own sake, but only as a means of gratifying her desires. If he was lost to _her_, the tiger might as well dine on him. How differently an American girl would have acted, under the impulse of romantic love! Not for a moment could she have tolerated the thought of his dying, through her fault--the thought of his agony, his shrieks, his blood. She would have _sacrificed her own happiness instead of her beloved's life_. The lady would have come out of the door opened by him. Suppose that, overcome by selfish jealousy, she acted otherwise; and suppose that an amphitheatre full of cultured men and women witnessed her deed: would there not be a cry of horror, condemning her as worse than the tiger, as absolutely incapable of the feeling of true love? And would not this cry of horror reveal on the part of the spectators an instinctive perception of the truth which this chapter, this whole book, is written to enforce, that voluntary self-sacrifice, where called for, is the supreme, the infallible, test of love? A GREEK LOVE-STORY If we imagine the situation reversed--a man delivering his "beloved" into the clutches of a tiger rather than to the legitimate caresses of a rival--our horror at his loveless selfishness would be doubled. Yet this is the policy habitually followed by savages and barbarians. In later chapters instances will be given of such wooers killing coveted girls with their own spears as soon as they find that the rival is the winner. After what has been said about the absence of unselfish gallantry among the lower races it would, of course, be useless to look for instances of altruistic self-sacrifice for a woman's sake, since such sacrifice implies so much more than gallantry. As for the Greeks, in all my extensive reading I have come across only one author who seemingly appreciates the significance of self-sacrifice for a woman loved. Pausanias, in his _Description of Greece_ (Bk. VII., chap. 21), relates this love-story: