women who are endowed with more than common intellectual ability have
to choose one of two alternatives--love, or what is called love, and
child-bearing,--or fame, and lifelong loneliness.

The Marchese Rivardi, thinking along the usual line of masculine logic,
had frequently turned over the problem of Morgana's complex character
such as it appeared to him,--and had almost come to the conclusion that
if he only had patience he would succeed in persuading her that
wifehood and motherhood were more conducive to a woman's happiness than
all the most amazing triumphs of scientific discovery and attainment.
He was perfectly right according to simple natural law,--but he chose
to forget that women's mental outlook has, in these modern days, been
greatly widened,--whether for their gain or loss it is not yet easy to
say. Even for men "much knowledge increaseth sorrow,"--and it may be
hinted that women, with their often overstrung emotions and exaggerated
sentiments, are not fit to plunge deeply into studies which tax the
brain to its utmost capacity and try the nerves beyond the level of the
calm which is essential to health. Though it has to be admitted that
married life is less peaceful than hard study--and the bright woman who
recently said, "A husband is more trying than any problem in Euclid,"
no doubt had good cause for the remark. Married or single, woman both
physically and mentally is the greatest sufferer in the world--her time
of youth and unthinking joy is brief, her martyrdom long--and it is
hardly wonderful that she goes so often "to the bad" when there is so
little offered to attract her towards the good.

Rivardi, letting himself go on the flood-tide of hope and ambition,
pleased his mind with imaginary pictures of Morgana as his wife and as
mother of his children, rehabilitating his fallen fortunes, restoring
his once great house and building a fresh inheritance for its former
renown. He saw no reason why this should not be,--yet--even while he
indulged in his thoughts of her, he knew well enough that behind her
small delicate personality there was a powerful intellectual "lens," so
to speak, through which she examined the ins and outs of character in
man or woman; and he felt that he was always more or less under this
"lens," looked at as carefully as a scientist might study bacteria, and
that as a matter of fact it was as unlikely as the descent of the
moon-goddess to Endymion that she would ever submit hers