I have often wondered if even the law of self-preservation justified my act.

It is an awful thing to inflict death, but it is worse to endure it, and I feel sure that I am foolish to allow my conscience to trouble me for the sake of those who would have led me back to the scaffold.
I fear you will think that six dead men in less than as many pages make a record of bloodshed giving promise of terrible things to come, but I am glad I can reassure you on that point.

Although there may be some good fighting ahead of us, I believe the last man has been killed of whom I shall chronicle--the last, that is, in fight or battle.
In truth, the history which you are about to read is not my own.

It is the story of a beautiful, wilful girl, who was madly in love with the one man in all the world whom she should have avoided--as girls are wont to be.
This perverse tendency, philosophers tell us, is owing to the fact that the unattainable is strangely alluring to womankind.

I, being a man, shall not, of course, dwell upon the foibles of my own sex.