“You are the last person I should have expected advocate the happiness of the unknown; but I have thought that out for myself, and more than once. I believe that the only way a woman can avoid the cut of her sex is to avoid the fulfilment of love. Then the fates are placated, and, after the first wrench, permit the imagination a certain happiness, the soul a certain elevation, no doubt impossible in what must eventually become prosaic and disappointing.” “I am not surprised that you have arrived at that truth by yourself; and be sure that all the troubles in the world amount to little if you can bear them alone, and that no troubles, barring poverty and pain, count an infinitesimal speck in the balance with those made by love, or the desperate attempt to find happiness. Indeed, I will modify what I said just now, and stake my life that a woman is happy only when she is not in love. There is no such thing as sympathy between the soul of man and woman. The man who thinks he sympathizes with a woman’s subtle wants is a milksop. The other, the only sort we love, doesn’t try, never thinks about it; and either way we are miserable, having the primal curse of Eve upon us. So, the old maids, or the quickly widowed, have the best of it in this life. Doubtless things are better arranged in another.” “Perhaps in that we will be born without imagination. I don’t know but that would be the deepest definition of heaven after all.” “I think it more likely that in alternate existences the man of one is the woman of another,” said Sarolta dryly. “That would be Nature and her compensations as we know them. On the whole she is just.” XXIV Fessenden was walking restlessly about the hall of the castle, awaiting the finish of Ranata’s visit of duty at the bedside of her duenna. There was a prospect, for the first time in several days, of an hour with her alone. Zrinyi, Prince Illehazy, Vilma, and Alexandra had gone for a walk, and Piroska had not been seen that day.