"That depends on how sharp the dagger is," returned Mary of Scotland. "If the axe had been dull"---- From the heart of a red rose Juliet looked out; the golden centre crowned her head with yellow tresses; her tender hazel eyes were calm with intact passion; her mouth was scarlet with fresh kisses, and full of consciousness and repose. "Harder it is to live for love," said she; "hardest of all to have ever lived without it." "How much do you all help the matter?" said a practical Yankee voice from a pink hollyhock. "If the infinite relations of life assert themselves in marriage, and the infinite I merges its individuality in the personality of another, the superincumbent need of a passional relation passes without question. What the soul of the seeker asks from itself and the universe is, whether the ultimate principle of existent life is passional or philosophic." "Your dialectic is wanting in purity of expression," calmly said Hypatia; "the tongue of Olympus suits gods and their ministers only." "Plato hath no question of the matter in hand," observed Lady Jane Grey, with a tone of finishing the subject. "I know nothing of your questions and philosophies," scornfully stormed Cleopatra. "Fire seeks fire, and clay, clay. Isis send me Antony, and every philosopher in Alexandria may go drown in the Nile! Shall I blind my eyes with scrolls of papyrus when there is a goodly Roman to be looked upon?" From the deep blue petals of a double English violet came a delicate face, pale, serene, sad, but exceeding tender. "Love liveth when the lover dies," said Lady Rachel Russell. "I have well loved my lord in the prison; shall I cease to affect him when he is become one of the court above?" "You are cautious of speech, Mesdames," carelessly spoke Marguerite. "Women are the fools of men; you all know it. Every one of you has carried cap and bell." They all turned toward the hawk's-bill tulip; it was not there. "Gone to Kenilworth," demurely sneered Mary of Scotland. A pond-lily, floating in a tiny tank, opened its clasped petals; and with one bare pearly foot upon the green island of leaves, and the other touching the edge of the marble basin, clothed with a rippling, lustrous, golden garment of hair, that rolled downward in glittering masses to her slight ankles, and half hid the wide, innocent, blue eyes and infantile, smiling lips, Eve said, "I was made for Adam," and slipped silently again into the closing flower. "But we have changed all that!" answered Marguerite, tossing her jewel-clasped curls. "They whom the saints call upon to do battle for king and country have their nature after the manner of their deeds," came a clear voice from the fleur-de-lis, that clothed itself in armor, and flashed from under a helmet the keen, dark eyes and firm, beardless lips of a woman. "There have been cloistered nuns," timidly breathed La Vallière. "There is a monk's-hood in that parterre without," said Marguerite.