You ask the use of it?
--" "Yes--the use of it--without love!" he answered, his voice shaken with a sudden emotion--"Madonna, forgive me!--Listen with patience for one moment!--and think of the whole world mastered and possessed--but without anyone to love in it--without anyone to love YOU! Suppose you could command the elements--suppose every force that science could bestow were yours, and yet!--no love for you--no love in yourself for anyone--what would be the use of it all?
Think, Madonna!" She raised her delicate eyebrows in a little surprise,--a faint smile was on her lips.
"Dear Marchese, I DO think! I HAVE thought!" she answered--"And I have observed! Love--such as I imagined it when I was quite a young girl--does not exist.

The passion called by that name is too petty and personal for me.

Men have made love to me often--not as prettily perhaps as you do!--but in America at least love means dollars! Yes, truly! Any man would love my dollars, and take me with them, just thrown in! You, perhaps--" "I should love you if you were quite poor!" he interposed vehemently.
She laughed.
"Would you?
Don't be angry if I doubt it! If I were 'quite poor' I could not have given you your big commission here--this house would not have been restored to its former beauty, and the White Eagle would be still a bird of the brain and not of the air! No, you very charming Marchese!--I should not have the same fascination for you without my dollars!--and I may tell you that the only man I ever felt disposed to like,--just a little,--is a kind of rude brute who despises my dollars and me!" His brows knitted involuntarily.
"Then there IS some man you like ?" he asked, stiffly.
"I'm not sure!" she answered, lightly--"I said I felt 'disposed' to like him! But that's only in the spirit of contradiction, because he detests ME! And it's a sort of duel between us of sheer intellectuality, because he is trying to discover--in the usual slow, laborious, calculating methods of man--the very thing I HAVE discovered! He's on the verge--But not across it!" "And so--he may outstrip you ?" And the Marchese's eyes glittered with sudden anger--"He may claim YOUR discovery as his own ?" Morgana smiled.

She was ascending the steps of the loggia, and she paused a moment in the full glare of the Sicilian sunshine, her wonderful gold hair shining in it with the hue of a daffodil.
"I think not!" she said--"Though of course it depends on the use he makes of it.

He--like all men--wishes to destroy; I, like all women, wish to create!" One or two of the workmen who were busy polishing the rose-marble pilasters of the loggia, here saluted her--she returned their salutations with an enchanting smile.
"How delightful it all is!" she said--"I feel the real use of dollars at last! This beautiful 'palazzo,' in one of the loveliest places in the world--all the delicious flowers running down in garlands to the very shore of the sea-and liberty to enjoy life as one wishes to enjoy it, without hindrance or argument--without even the hindrance and argument of--love!" She laughed, and gave a mirthful upward glance at the Marchese's somewhat sullen countenance.