"My heart is no tablet of mere wax, from which an instant's heat can dissolve wh

atever impress it may bear, leaving it blank and soft for another impress, and a
nother, and another. My heart is a bright hard gem, proof against any die. Came
Cupid, with one of his arrow-points for graver, and what he cut on the gem's sur
face never can be effaced. There, deeply and forever, your image is intagliated.
No years, nor fires, nor cataclysm of total Nature, can efface from that great
gem your image."
From ZULEIKA DOBSON; OR AN OXFORD LOVE STORY, by Max Beerbohm