"A Queen! A Queen of Israel! The Queen of the most kingly of men, though he were uncrowned!" What problems of political import were thus thrust upon her! What tides of ambition swept over her! The highest, deepest, purest ambition. She grew dizzy with the confusion of her thoughts. Their very weight seemed to paralyze her brain. She ceased to think, and sat down like one distraught.
At length her mind, rested by its brief vacuity, began again its working.
"A Queen!"
She dismissed this consideration; for, momentous as was the destiny it involved, there was something else that appealed more urgently for decision. She was a woman. To her a throne seemed but a passing circumstance. There was a deeper issue.
"Love is the abiding thing. Can I be—the wife of Judas? Could this man, noble as he is, possess my life, my soul? Is admiration, or even reverence and self-sacrificing devotion—is this love? Or does the soul have depths as well as heights; and does worshipful regard dwell on the heights, and love in the depths, so that they may be utterly remote from each other, indeed, antagonistic? Dion is not comparable with Judas. Judas is on the heights; nothing higher, save God Himself. But Dion—he has his place, too; but where?"
She now remembered that the beginning of Gideon ben Sirach's story, which had so nearly made a Jew of the Greek, started in her a glow of happiness, and that she had felt a strange disappointment at its conclusion, which still left him a Greek. What did this experience mean? Did she really love this alien? As one of foreign blood he could never come into her life. The laws of her people, especially as interpreted by the Jewish purists, would forbid such a thing as marriage with him. She had been taught this doctrine by her father. It was one of the underlying occasions of the war. The Maccabæans regarded pure blood as next to the purity of worship.
So she said, "Dion cannot come into my life."
Then, having settled the matter so far, she thought of Judas:
"What other woman of Israel would presume to decline such a proposal? And who am I to set an example of conceit?
"The Queen of Israel!"