er, yet she had
sounded them all. She had a disgust for realizations, and at the same
time a taste for them. If she had stabbed herself, it would, like
Lucretia, not have been until afterwards. She was a virgin stained with
every defilement in its visionary stage. She was a possible Astarte in a
real Diana. She was, in the insolence of high birth, tempting and
inaccessible. Nevertheless, she might find it amusing to plan a fall for
herself. She dwelt in a halo of glory, half wishing to descend from it,
and perhaps feeling curious to know what a fall was like. She was a
little too heavy for her cloud. To err is a diversion. Princely
unconstraint has the privilege of experiment, and what is frailty in a
plebeian is only frolic in a duchess. Josiana was in everything--in
birth, in beauty, in irony, in brilliancy--almost a queen. She had felt
a moment's enthusiasm for Louis de Bouffles, who used to break
horseshoes between his fingers. She regretted that Hercules was dead.
She lived in some undefined expectation of a voluptuous and supreme
ideal.

Morally, Josiana brought to one's mind the line--

"Un beau torse de femme en hydre se termine."

Hers was a noble neck, a splendid bosom, heaving harmoniously over a
royal heart, a glance full of life and light, a countenance pure and
haughty, and who knows? below the surface was there not, in a
semi-transparent and misty depth, an undulating, supernatural
prolongation, perchance deformed and dragon-like--a proud virtue ending
in vice in the depth of dreams.

II.

With all that she was a prude.

It was the fashion.

Remember Elizabeth.

Elizabeth was of a type that prevailed in England for three
centuries--the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth. Elizabeth was
more than English--she was Anglican. Hence the deep respect of the
Episcopalian Church for that queen--respect resented by the Church of
Rome, which counterbalanced it with a dash of excommunication. In the
mouth of Sixtus V., when anathematizing Elizabeth, malediction turned to
madrigal. "_Un gran cervello di principessa_," he says. Mary Stuart,
less concerned with the church and more with the woman part of the
question, had little respect for her sister Elizabeth, and wrote to her
as queen to queen and coquette to prude: "Your disinclination to
marriage arises from your not wishing to lose the liberty of being made
love to." Mary Stuart played with the fan, Elizabeth with the axe. An
uneven match.