The abbot shook his head sorrowfully and would not meet her eyes, for in this he knew that she was right.
"When an army has lost faith," he said, "it is already beaten. When
Atalanta stooped to pick up the golden apples, her race was lost."
"As when love dies, contempt and hatred take its place," said Eleanor, as if in comment.
"Suck love is of hell," said Bernard, looking suddenly into her face, so that she faintly blushed.
"Yes," she retorted scornfully, "for it is the love of man and wife."
The holy man watched her sadly and yet keenly, for he knew what she meant, and he foresaw the end.
"Lucifer rebelled against law," he said.
"I do not wonder," said the Queen, with a sharp laugh. "He would have rebelled against marriage. Love is the true faith—marriage is the dogma." She laughed again.
Bernard shrank a little as if he felt actual pain. He had known her since she had been a little child, yet he had never become used to her cruelties of expression. He was a man more easily disgusted in his aesthetic sensibilities than shocked by the wickedness of a world he knew. To him, God was not only great, but beautiful; Nature, as some theologians maintain, was cruel, evil, hurtful, but she was never coarse, nor foul in his conception, and her beauty appealed to him against his will. So also in his eyes a woman could be sinful, and her sins might seem terrible to him, and yet she herself was to him a woman still, a being delicate, refined, tender even in her wickedness; but a woman who could speak at once keenly and brutally of her marriage reacted upon him as a very ugly or painful sight, or as a very harsh and discordant sound that jars every nerve in the body.
"Madam," he said in a low voice, but very quietly and coldly, "I think not that you are in such state of grace as to bear the Cross to your good."