CHAPTER XIX.
If you look into life, you will find that the key-note of every woman's existence is love--the broad, the great, the grand passion.
She may take up a million causes, champion a thousand aims; but the end that she reaches--is love.

To fail in such an end--to lose the grasp of it when once it might have been hers--this is the most bitter of aloes; gall that eats into her blood and corrodes her clearest vision.

A man, forging destinies, is a king, to be mated only with a woman who loves.
There are exceptions; but these are not needed to prove the rule; for there hangs even some doubt, like a fly in the amber, in the history of Jeanne D'Arc, the most patent an example of them all.

Yet whether, as some chronicles would say, she was never burnt as a witch, but smuggled into the country, and there mated in love--and it would seem a shame unpardonable to rob history of a great martyr and the Church of Rome of a saint--it makes no odds in the counting.

Great women have loved greatly--lesser women have loved less--but all who are of the sex have made the heart their master, and obeyed it whenever it has truly called.
So it had come to Sally.