Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/42

Rh has been spent in confuting—as witness every book I have ever written, every speech I have ever spoken. Having put this on record, I now drop all that matter,—both the falsehoods and the falsifiers, forever and forevermore, as being beneath either notice or contempt.

The demand for novelty, "variety," or change in love matters, is not a part of my being, and only foiled zealots—feminine—and worse things in male shape, ever started such malignant slanders against me,—human perverts of both genders, who, failing to induce me to pervert certain knowledge and powers to their base ends and systems, sought to injure me by the meanest and most contemptible of all possible scandal. But I laughed at the cyprians, and snapped my fingers at the rogues in grain. I am only capable of one love at one time, but that time to me fastens its further end to the eternities just ahead of us all. Temporary attractions departed with my dead years, thank Heaven, and their fruitage was ever bitter, bitter.

XV. So true is the statement concerning the vastly greater and superior relative value of the Feminine Principle, that even in the present lubricious age, when woman is almost everywhere wrongly rated, badly educated, and worse placed than she should be, there is still, deep down in the hearts of most, even the coarsest men, a measure of gallant respect, which occasionally gleams forth in noble deeds, and brave championage of the sex, in such guise as to give great hope for fuller and better things by and by.

The chivalry of all ages has not only proved feal to her and acknowledged its dependence upon her smile and frown, boldly fighting for her right or wrong, then, in the foretime, just as now; but has taken especial pains to celebrate individual women and the universal sex; and this worship of the second, if not the primal element of nature, has been carried further, and been more general, than the modern reader might imagine. For instance, who among those who peruse this essay would believe, save on most indubitable evidence, that the very flower of one, nay, two of the leading nations of the world this day do homage to the emblem of Womanhood? Yet, nevertheless, such is the fact; for the noblest regalia, the highest honor won and worn by Britain's proudest men, is to be acknowledged