"Rubbish!" she answered, "nothing is impossible. Besides, I ask it,"
"I do not know you well enough," I declared, helping myself to an artichoke, "to be personal."
"The liberties you take in your thoughts," she answered, "I permit you to render into speech. It is the same thing."
"One's thoughts," I answered, "are too phantasmagorial. One cannot collect them into speech."
"You must try," she declared, "or I shall never, never dine with you again. Nothing is so interesting as to see yourself from another's point of view!"
"Is it understood," I asked, "that I am not held personally responsible for my thoughts—that if I try to clothe them with words, I am held free from offence?"
She considered for a moment.
"I suppose so," she said. "Yes! Go on."
I drank off my glass of wine, and waited until the waiter, who had been carving a Rouen duckling on a stand by the side of the table, had stepped back into the background.
"Very well!" I said. "I am thirty-three years old and a bachelor, well off, and I have never been a stay-at-home. I know something of society in Paris, in Vienna, in Rome, as well as London. I have always found women agreeable companions, and I have never avoided them. The sex, as a whole, has attracted me. From individual members of it I have happened to remain absolutely heart-whole."