"You have a right to say what you will," she began, "for I sat down beside you, as one woman by another, and you have taken me at my word. Love is the very blood of equality. You blame me, and I do not blame you, though I brought up the Church's rule against your love. You are right in all you say, and I am sinful. I grant you that freely, and I will grant also that if I had my due I should be doing penance on my knees instead of defending my sins to you if indeed I am defending them. But do you think that our bad deeds are weighed only against the unattainable perfection of saints' and martyrs' lives, and never at all against the splendid temptations that are the royal garments of sin? God is just, and justice weaves a fair judgment. It is not an unchangeable standard. A learned Greek in Constantinople was telling me he other day a story of one Procrustes, a terrible highway robber. He had a bed which he offered to those he took captive, on condition that they should exactly fit its length; and if a man was too long, the robber hewed off his feet by so much, but if he was too short, he stretched him on a rack until he was tall enough. If God were to judge me as He judges you, by a ruled length of virtue, alike for all and without allowance for our moral height, God would not be God, but Procrustes, a robber of souls and a murderer of them." "You speak very blasphemously," said Beatrix, in a low voice. "No; I speak justly. You and I both love one man. In you, love is virtue, in me it is sin. You blame me with right, but you blame me too much. You tell me that I am beautiful, powerful, the Queen of France, and it is true. But even you do not tell me that I am happy, for you know that I am not." "And therefore you would rob me of all I have, to make your happiness, when you have so much that I have not! Is that your justice?" "No," answered Eleanor, almost sadly, "it is not justice. It is my excuse to God and man, before whom you say I am condemned." The girl roused herself again, and though it was sharp pain to move, she raised her weight upon her elbow and looked straight into the Queen's eyes. "You argue and you make excuses," she said boldly. "I ask for none. I ask only that you should not take the one happiness I have out of my life. You say that we are speaking as woman to woman. What right have you to the man I love? No, do not answer me with another dissertation on the soul. Woman to woman, tell me what right you have?" "If he loves me, is that no right?" "If he loves you? Oh, no! He does not love you yet!" "He saved me yesterday--not you," answered the Queen, cruelly, and she remembered his eyes. "Does a man risk his life desperately, as he did, for the woman he loves, or for another, when both are in like danger?" "It was not you, it was the Queen he saved. It is right that a loyal man should save his sovereign first. I do not blame him. I should not have blamed him had I been more hurt than I am."