Only, only there always arrives a moment in which comparison stops; here it falls into an abyss. Zenobia was _Queen_. She ruled a people; she defended at once her country and her warlike renown. She had an object--an object of conquests to create an empire. Lady Hester was a tourist. She conducted into the vast world the idle fancies of an empty heart. She defended her reputation of eccentric woman by vengeance, by bravado and by ennui. When a woman begins to know that she is eccentric, she is speedily unendurable. As for political designs, did Lady Hester think of resuming on her own account the project of a Palmyrian empire. Bruce insinuated it, not without some irony. Perhaps he did not feel an inclination to play to the life the part of a Longinus, delivered up by Zenobia without remorse, condemned to death and walking to execution with a resigned serenity! Who knows if she will not reveal herself another Zenobia, thought he, musing, and if she were not destined to bring back Palmyra to its former splendour? Perhaps will she form a matrimonial connection--the expression is his--with Ebu Sihoud, the King of the Wahabis. Oh! evidently, he was not represented as a very amorous object. He had a harsh look, a bronzed skin, and a black beard and disposition, but he was undoubtedly the richest monarch in the whole world. After the sack of 1806, strings of camels had left Mecca, carrying to Derayeh, the white Wahabi capital, defended by its thick woods of palm-trees and its ramparts of piled-up date-stones, all the presents which the faithful disciples of Mohammed had sent to the prophet's tomb since the beginning of the Hegira. Throne of massive gold incrusted with pearls and diamonds, the gift of a gorgeous King of Persia who had done much killing, crowns enriched with precious stones, lamps of silver and emerald, diamonds of the size of walnuts. That is sufficient to tempt the most sensible of young women, even if the prospective husband possesses a savage character and a sanguinary reputation. And for a sportswoman, what attraction in the sight of the royal stables? Eighty white mares with skins shining like silver, ranged in a single row, so incomparable and so exactly alike that one could not recognise one from the other, and one hundred and twenty others of different coats and admirably shaped! As so many less celebrated households, Ebu Sihoud and Hester Stanhope, sacrificing love to ambition, would join hands, would bring a great revolution into religion and politics and shake the throne of the Sultan to its base.