Page:The woman, the man, and the monster (IA womanmanmonster00dawe).pdf/202

 think so. I want you to love me as woman was never loved before.”

“But I do.”

“Just think of it, Perseus—just think of all the men and women who have been lovers! Why, even now the world is full of them.”

“Not lovers like us—there could never be lovers like us. The world is not large enough for them.”

“T like to think of old lovers,” she mused; “of the women of long ago, the dear, dead women of the forgotten centuries. Strange, too, is it not, that out of all the years the only women who come down to us, the only women in whom we take any real delight, are the great dead lovers? Strange, too, how time so mel- lows their wrongdoing that it seems to shine their one redeeming glory. Helen, Cleopatra, Mary Stuart. Strange that the national hero- ine of the dour religious Scots should be a wanton, and their national hero a drunken poet! Should we have known Guinevere had she been a true wife? Singular commentary on the pretentiousness of life, proving beyond doubt that the laws of nature and the laws of man must always be antagonistic. Sometimes