"Always," replied the Duke. "There should never be an exception to that rule; one ought to marry the woman selected by one's family."
"I thought," said the Duchess, "that I knew of an exception to the rule. I thought I knew of a man who found a wife for himself."
"I know the case quite well," said the Duke, "and you are mistaken."
"Mistaken!" she said.
"Yes," he said, "there was never in this world a woman more definitely selected by a family than the one you have in mind; there was never in this world a woman that a family made more desperate, unending, persistent efforts to obtain. From the day that the first ancestor saw her in that doomed city, down through generations to the day that the last one saw her on the coast of Brittany, to the day that the living one of this house found her in the bay of Oban, this family has been mad to possess her."
The butler, having placed the breakfast on the sideboard, had gone out. Caroline sat with her fingers linked under her chin.
"But was he sure," she said, "was he sure that this was the woman?"
The Duke leaned over and rested his arm on the table.
"How could he doubt it!" he said. "He found her by the sea, and he found, too, the wicked king and the saint of God, and the doomed palace; and, besides that, the longing, the accumulated longing of all those dead men who had seen her, and loved her, and been mad to possess her, was in him, and by this sign he knew her."
"And the others," she said, "all the others, they have received nothing!"