The Princess laughed lightly.

"Yes, and a moment afterwards he regrets his folly," she said. "He
clamors for the beautiful woman as a child might cry for the moon,
and when he at last possesses her, he tires. Satisfied with having
compassed her degradation, he exclaims: 'What shall I do with this
beauty, which, because it is mine, now palls upon me? Let me kill
it and forget it; I am aweary of love, and the world is full of
women!' That is the way of your sex, Monsieur Gervase; it is a
brutal way, but it is the one most of you follow."

"There is such a thing as love!" said Denzil, looking up quickly,
a pained flush on his handsome face.

"In the hearts of women, yes!" said Ziska, her voice growing
tremulous with strange and sudden passion. "Women love--ah!--with
what force and tenderness and utter abandonment of self! But their
love is in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred utterly wasted; it
is a largesse flung to the ungrateful, a jewel tossed in the mire!
If there were not some compensation in the next life for the ruin
wrought on loving women, the Eternal God himself would be a
mockery and a jest."

"And is he not?" queried Gervase, ironically. "Fair Princess, I
would not willingly shake your faith in things unseen, but what
does the 'Eternal God,' as you call Him, care as to the destiny of
any individual unit on this globe of matter? Does He interfere
when the murderer's knife descends upon the victim? And has He
ever interfered? He it is who created the sexes and placed between
them the strong attraction that often works more evil and misery