"I thought you knew all about those sort of things."
"So did I," said Vernon to himself. Aloud he said:
"If you want a philosophic definition: it's passion transfigured by tenderness—at least I've often said so."
"But can you feel that for two people at once?"
"Or," said Vernon, getting interested in his words, "it's tenderness intoxicated by passion, and not knowing that it's drunk—"
"But can you feel that for two—"
"Oh, bother," said Vernon, "every sort of fool-fancy calls itself love. There's the pleasure of pursuit—there's vanity, there's the satisfaction of your own amour-propre, there's desire, there's intellectual attraction, there's the love of beauty, there's the artist's joy in doing what you know you can do well, and getting a pretty woman for sole audience. You might feel one or two or twenty of these things for one woman, and one or two or twenty different ones for another. But if you mean do you love two women in the same way, I say no. Thank Heaven it's new every time."
"It mayn't be the same way," said Temple, "but it's the same thing to you—if you feel you can't bear to give either of them up."
"Well, then, you can marry one and keep on with the other. Or be 'friends' with both and marry neither. Or cut the whole show and go to the Colonies."
"Then you have to choose between being unhappy or being a blackguard."