Page:Meda - a tale of the future.djvu/288

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284
MEDA:

intensity of sorrow? Yes, I fully believe it did. The more intellectual man or woman is, the more acute are their joys and their sorrows, and the more acutely they feel pain, The lower animals do not suffer the same bodily pain that men do, nor do the lower or uneducated mortals experience the intensity of pleasure, or the same intensity of pain as the educated and refined. All great pleasures are, as it were, balanced by proportionably great sorrows. Possibly this is intended to be so, and no doubt it is ordained for the best. The solitude of my cell caused me to ruminate over the last hours I spent in my own home. I went over every word I had said until I came to the statement I had made regarding my marriage and my family. This portion of my narrative I repeated over and over again to myself, when, suddenly, it flashed upon me that this was the cause of the whole commotion. I now remembered that one of the laws of this people was that no man could marry a second time, even after his wife's death, but here I was married a second time; and I