long decline. The lecture was absorbing; and absorbed in the book
Lucretia still was, when she heard Dalibard's voice behind: he was
looking over her shoulder.

"A strange selection for so fair a student! En fant, play not with such
weapons."

"But is this all true?"

"True, though scarce a fragment of the truth. The physician was a sorry
chemist and a worse philosopher. He blundered in his analysis of the
means; and if I remember rightly, he whines like a priest at the
motives,--for see you not what was really the cause of this spreading
pestilence? It was the Saturnalia of the Weak,--a burst of mocking
license against the Strong; it was more,--it was the innate force of the
individual waging war against the many."

"I do not understand you."

"No? In that age, husbands were indeed lords of the household; they
married mere children for their lands; they neglected and betrayed them;
they were inexorable if the wife committed the faults set before her for
example. Suddenly the wife found herself armed against her tyrant. His
life was in her hands. So the weak had no mercy on the strong. But man,
too, was then, even more than now, a lonely wrestler in a crowded arena.
Brute force alone gave him distinction in courts; wealth alone brought
him justice in the halls, or gave him safety in his home. Suddenly the
frail puny lean saw that he could reach the mortal part of his giant foe.
The noiseless sling was in his hand,--it smote Goliath from afar.
Suddenly the poor man, ground to the dust, spat upon by contempt, saw