“… counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.”

“Now that all the distractions of the material life had been removed, Macrina persuaded her mother to give up her ordinary life and all showy style of living and the services of domestics to which she had been accustomed before, and bring her point of view down to that of the masses, and to share the life of the maids, treating all her slave girls as if they were sisters and belonged to the same rank as herself.”

“Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.”

“Whether the queen caused the period, or the period creates the queen, she fitted her time perfectly.”

“Loyalty to the Queen does not require a man to bow down to her manservant, her maidservant, her ox… or her ass!”

“For she would be Queen of Lumatere.

But he would be king to her.”

“Nothing," she said softly. "A queen must possess nothing to rule because she has to give everything she has to her people. Even her life.”

“But the Queen has no such veto; She must sign her own death-warrant if the two Houses unanimously send it up to her.”

“She was our queen, our rose, our star;
And then she danced—O Heaven, her dancing!”

“How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being”