While she assured herself contemptuously that she did not, that the order of the centuries must be best merely because it was, a part of her brain seemed to her to accept the doctrine, and give itself no concern to argue. She turned her back upon it. Why argue, indeed? A month, a few months hence, possibly a year, the influence that now possessed her would be so far removed that her mind would have recovered its balance, alien thoughts must have sunk so deep that she would only unearth them now and again as curiosities. She made up her mind that if Alexandra did not marry Zrinyi she would put an end to the intimacy with herself; and it seemed to her, in her present unhappy condition, that she would be insensible to further sorrow. She should indeed welcome complete loneliness, barren of outward suggestion. There could be no doubt of the triumph, in time, of her strong will, of her absolute fidelity, in thought as in deed, to the lofty station to which she had been born. She sighed for her lost superstitions, rather for the superstitions of her fathers which might have been here had no alien influence entered her life. How they must sustain the soul of majesty through its trials, through its loneliness, through the long martyrdom of its earthly course. There had been times when she had heard the deep mutter of those ancient ghosts, when for a brief hour they had risen and possessed her brain. Indeed, there had been hours--usually when Alexandra’s uncompromising practicality summered in its native land--when it had seemed to her that in the depths of her soul was a charnel-house of hideous memories, ambiguous of outline, of old corruptions, unknown in her life but transmitted with her blood, of impulses for tyranny and cruelty, and unbridled passions, of lust of blood, and callous indifference to human suffering. Philip the Second and Joan the Mad were but two of her illustrious ancestors who might have sent filtering down the worst traits and impulses which the human heart is capable of supporting. There had been times when she had believed that had she been born a century earlier it would have needed but the circumstances to make her the vilest of women. She could have reigned with her feet in blood and loved as royal harlots have loved since Messalina burned her pitch in history. And, she recalled, as she listened to the soft passionless music of the opera, there had also been moments when she had regretted that no such life could be hers--wondered if indeed it had not been.