But she refused to understand love in that sense. In her opinion love was something disinterested, exalted, chaste, inexplicable.
She did not love her fiancé, but he was head over ears in love with her.
When I said so she lost her temper, and then confessed that she had never loved him.
"And yet you contemplate marrying him?"
"Because he would be lost if I didn't."
"Always that mania for saving souls!"
She grew more and more angry; she maintained that she was not, and never had been, really engaged to him. We had caught each other lying; what prospects!
There remained nothing for me to do now but to make a clean breast of it, and contradict my previous statement that I was "as good as engaged." This done, we were at liberty to make use of our freedom.
As she had now no longer any cause for jealousy, the game began afresh, and this time we played it in deadly earnest. I confessed my love to her—in writing. She forwarded the letter to her fiancé. He heaped insults on my head—by post.
I told her that she must choose between him and me. But she carefully refrained from doing so, for her object was to have me, him, and as many more as she could get, kneeling at her feet and adoring her. She was a flirt, a mangeuse d'hommes, a chaste polyandrist.