probably the Sabine women preferred their fate to no fate at all."

"Don't be bitter on so old and impersonal a topic, Naomi. It is the
law of life that one must give, and one must take. That the emotions
differ does not prove that one is better than the other."

Shattuck took a turn up and down the long room, not quite at ease with
himself.

Mrs. Shattuck seemed to be thinking. As he passed her, he stopped,
picked up her cushions, and re-arranged them about her, with an idle
caress by the way, a kiss gently dropped on the inside of her white
wrist.

She followed his every movement with a strange speculative look in her
eyes, almost as if he were some new and strange animal that she was
studying for the first time.

When she spoke again, it was to go on as if she had not been
interrupted, "It seems to me that man comes out of a great passion
just as good as new, while a woman is shattered--in a moral
sense--and never fully recovers herself."

Shattuck's back was toward her when he replied. "Sorry to spoil any
more illusions, dear child, but how about the long list of men who are
annually ruined by it? The men in the prisons, the men who kill
themselves, the men who hang for it?"

"Those are crimes. I am not talking of the criminal classes, but of
the world in which normal people live."