Kings have their policies and wars wherewith to drug each human appetite.  But their consorts are denied these makeshifts; and love may rationally be defined as the pivot of each normal woman’s life, and in consequence as the arbiter of that ensuing life which is eternal.  Because—­as anciently Propertius demanded, though not, to speak the truth, of any woman—­

  Quo fugis? ah demens! nulla est fuga, tu licet usque
  Ad Tanaim fugias, usque sequetur amor.

And a dairymaid, let us say, may love whom she will, and nobody else be a penny the worse for her mistaking of the preferable nail whereon to hang her affections; whereas with a queen this choice is more portentous.  She plays the game of life upon a loftier table, ruthlessly illuminated, she stakes by her least movement a tall pile of counters, some of which are, of necessity, the lives and happiness of persons whom she knows not, unless it be by vague report.  Grandeur sells itself at this hard price, and at no other.  A queen must always play, in fine, as the vicar of destiny, free to choose but very certainly compelled in the ensuing action to justify that choice:  as is strikingly manifested by the authentic histories of Brunhalt, and of Guenevere, and of swart Cleopatra, and of many others that were born to the barbaric queenhoods of extinct and dusty times.

All royal persons are (I take it) the immediate and the responsible stewards of Heaven; and since the nature of each man is like a troubled stream, now muddied and now clear, their prayer must ever be, Defenda me, Dios, de me!  Yes, of exalted people, and even of their near associates, life, because it aims more high than the aforementioned Aristotle, demands upon occasion a more great catharsis, which would purge any audience of unmanliness, through pity and through terror, because, by a quaint paradox, the players have been purged of humanity.  For a moment Destiny has thrust her scepter into the hands of a human being and Chance has exalted a human being to decide the issue of many human lives.  These two—­with what immortal chucklings one may facilely imagine—­have left the weakling thus enthroned, free to direct the heavy outcome, free to choose, and free to evoke much happiness or age-long weeping, but with no intermediate course unbarred. Now prove thyself! saith Destiny; and Chance appends:  Now prove thyself to be at bottom a god or else a beast, and now eternally abide that choice.  And now (O crowning irony!) we may not tell thee clearly by which choice thou mayst prove either.

In this little book about the women who intermarried, not very enviably, with an unhuman race (a race predestinate to the red ending which I have chronicled elsewhere, in The Red Cuckold), it is of ten such moments that I treat.