Zuleika Dobson; Or, An Oxford Love Story

“Vae tibi, vae misero, nisi circumspexeris artes Femineas, nam nulla salus quin femina possit Tradere, nulla fides quin”-- “Quin,” he repeated. In writing soliloquies, his trouble was to curb inspiration. The thought that he was addressing his heir-presumptive--now heir-only-too-apparent--gave him pause. Nor, he reflected, was he addressing this brute only, but a huge posthumous audience. These hexameters would be sure to appear in the “authorised” biography. “A melancholy interest attaches to the following lines, written, it would seem, on the very eve of”... He winced. Was it really possible, and no dream, that he was to die to-morrow--to-day? Even you, unassuming reader, go about with a vague notion that in your case, somehow, the ultimate demand of nature will be waived. The Duke, until he conceived his sudden desire to die, had deemed himself certainly exempt. And now, as he sat staring at his window, he saw in the paling of the night the presage of the dawn of his own last day. Sometimes (orphaned though he was in early childhood) he had even found it hard to believe there was no exemption for those to whom he stood in any personal relation. He remembered how, soon after he went to Eton, he had received almost with incredulity the news of the death of his god-father, Lord Stackley, an octogenarian.... He took from the table his album, knowing that on one of the earliest pages was inscribed his boyish sense of that bereavement. Yes, here the passage was, written in a large round hand: