Startling were the details given in the work,--the anecdotes, the histories, the astonishing craft brought daily to bear on the victim, the wondrous perfidy of the subtle means, the variation of the certain murder,--here swift as epilepsy, there slow and wasting as 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.