Part 14 (1/2)

And you are satisfied? O beautiful Princess, you are of ill.u.s.trious lineage and mind, and learned. Your father brought you up on Plutarch instead of Amadis; you know many things; but there is one, methinks, no one can know the nature of it until he has it.

PRINCESS

What is that, pray?

DIEGO

A heart. Because you have not got one yet, you make your plans without it,--a negligible item in your life.

Princess

I am not a child.

DIEGO

But not yet a woman.

PRINCESS (_meditatively_)

You think, then----

DIEGO

I do not _think_; I _know_. And _you_ will know, some day. And then----

PRINCESS

Then I shall suffer. Why, we must all suffer. Say that, having a heart, a heart for husband or child, means certain grief,--well, does not riding, walking down your stairs, mean the chance of broken bones? Does not living mean old age, disease, possible blindness or paralysis, and quite inevitable aches? If, as you say, I must needs grow a heart, and if a heart must needs give agony, why, I shall live through heartbreak as through pain in any other limb.

DIEGO

Yes,--were your heart a limb like all the rest,--but 'tis the very centre and fountain of all life.

PRINCESS

You think so? 'Tis, methinks, pus.h.i.+ng a.n.a.logy too far, and metaphor.

This necessary organ, diffusing life throughout us, and, as physicians say, removing with its vigorous floods all that has ceased to live, replacing it with new and living tissue,--this great literal heart cannot be the seat of only one small pa.s.sion.

DIEGO

Yet I have known more women than one die of that small pa.s.sion's frustrating.

PRINCESS

But you have known also, I reckon, many a man in whom life, what he had to live for, was stronger than all love. They say the Duke my cousin's melancholy sickness was due to love which he had outlived.

DIEGO They say so, Madam.

PRINCESS (_thoughtfully_)