He came to me, one morning, rather earlier than his wont. I was reading, but laid aside my book to greet him.
"What have you there, Juanita? Some young-ladyish romance, I suppose."
"Not at all,--it is a very rational work; though I presume you will laugh at it, because it contains a little sentiment,--you are grown so hard and cold, of late."
"Do you think so?" he asked, with a look that belied the charge.
He took up the volume, and, glancing through it, read now and then a sentence.
"What say you to this, Juanita? 'If we are still able to love one who has made us suffer, we love him more than ever.' Is that true to your experience?"
"No," I answered, for I liked at times to approach the topic which was always uppermost in my mind, and to see his perfect unconsciousness of it. "If any one had made me suffer, I should not stop to inquire whether I were able to love him still or not; I should have but one thought left,--revenge!"
"How very fierce!" he said, laughing. "And your idea of revenge is--what? To stab him with your own white hand?"
"No!" I said, scornfully. "To kill a person you hate is, to my mind, the most pitiful idea of vengeance. What! put him out of the world at once? Not so! He should live," I said, fixing my eyes upon him,--"and live to suffer,--and to remember, in his anguish, why he suffered, and to whose hand he owed it!"
It was a hateful speech, and would have repelled most men; for my life I dared not have made it before John. But I knew to whom I was talking, and that he had no objection to a slight spice of _diablerie_.
"What curious glimpses of character you open to me now and then," he said, thoughtfully. "Not very womanly, however."
"Womanly!" I cried. "I wonder what a man's notion of woman is! Some soft, pulpy thing that thrives all the better for abuse? a spaniel that loves you more, the more you beat it? a worm that grows and grows in new rings as often as you cut it asunder? I wonder history has never taught you better. Look at Judith with Holofernes,--Jael with Sisera,--or if you want profane examples, Catherine de Medicis, Mademoiselle de Brinvilliers, Charlotte Corday. There are women who have formed a purpose, and gone on steadily toward its accomplishment, even though, like that Roman girl,--Tullia was her name?--they had to drive over a father's corpse to do it."
