Love and marriage were things so apart from his activities as to be uninteresting.

When finally he was called in full manhood to assume without preliminary both of these things, he was uncomfortable and apprehensive.

But after he had met the girl in the hills, his sensations of reluctance became emphatic, became an actual dread, so that he thrust away all thought of the domestic side of the life that confronted him, and bitterly resigned all hope in the tender things that were the portion of all men.

The villainy of Julian of Ephesus engaged him chiefly, and his punishment.

After that, then the establishment of his kingdom, politics, conquest and power--but not love! Late that afternoon, he stepped out of a wady west of Jerusalem and halted.
Ahead of him ran a road depressed between worn, hard, bare banks of earth, past a deserted pool, marged with stone, up shining surfaces of outcropping rock, through avenues of clustered tombs, pillars, pagan monuments which were tracks of the Herods, dead and abandoned, splendid pleasure gardens, suburban palaces lifeless and still, toward the looming Tower of Hippicus, brooding over a fast-closed gate.
The Maccabee nodded.