"That was how I came to find George out, to discover he was not the terrible cavalier, the abandoned squire of dames the world said he was. His reputation was purely bogus. The gossips might buzz, but I had it on the highest authority. I was the first woman he had ever loved. What pleasure is there in such a conquest? It grieved me to break his heart, but I had no option.
"Daythorpe was another fellow who taught me the same lesson of the purity and high emotions of his cruelly libelled sex. He, too, when driven into a corner (far from the madding crowd) confessed that I was the only woman he had ever loved. I have tried them all—poets and musicians, barristers and business-men. They all had suffered from the same incapacity for affection till they met me. It was quite pathetic to discover how truly all men were brothers. The only difference was that while some added I was the only woman they ever could love, others insisted that never man had loved before as they did now. The latter lovers always remind me of advertisers offering a superior article to anything in the trade. Nowhere could I meet the man I longed for—the man who had lived and loved. Once I felt stirrings towards a handsome young widower, but he went out of his way to assure me he had never cared for his first wife. After that, of course, he had no chance.
Platonic Love.
"Unable to discover any but good young men, I resigned myself perforce to spinsterhood. I resolved to cultivate only Platonic relations. I told young men to come to me and tell me their troubles. I encouraged them to sit at my feet and confide in me while I held their hands to give them courage. But even so they would never confess anything worth hearing, and if they did love anybody it invariably turned out to be me and me only. Yes, I grieve to say these Platonic young men were just as good as the others; leaving out the audacity of their proposing to me when I had given them no encouragement. Here again I found men distressingly alike. They are constitutionally unable to be girls' chums, they are always hankering to convert the friendship into love. Time after time anticipations of a genuine comradeship were rudely dispelled by fatuous philandering. Yet I never ceased to be surprised, and I never lost hope. Such, I suppose, is the simple trustfulness of a girl's nature. In time I got to know when the explosion was coming, and this deadened the shock. I found it was usually preceded by suicidal remarks of a retrospective character. My comrades would tell me of their past lives, of the days when the world's oyster was yet unopened by them. In those dark days (tears of self-pity came into their eyes as they spoke of them) they were on the point of suicide—to a man. Only, one little thing always came to save them—their first brief, the acceptance of their first article, poem or song, the opportune deaths of aunts, the chance hearing of an organ-note rolling through the portal of a village church on a Sunday afternoon, a letter from an old schoolmaster. The obvious survival of the narrators rather spoiled the sensational thrill for me, but they themselves were always keenly touched by the story. And from suicide in the past to suicide in the future was an easy transition. Alas, I was the connecting link. They loved me—and unless I returned their love, that early suicide would prove to have been merely postponed. In the course of conversation it transpired that I was the first woman they had ever loved. I remember once rejecting on this account two such Platonic failures, within ten minutes of each other. One was a well-known caricaturist, and the other was the editor of a lady's paper. Each left me, declaring his heart was broken, that I had led him on shamelessly, that I was a heartless jilt and that he would go and kill himself. My brother Tom accidentally told me he saw them together about an hour afterwards at a bar in the Strand, asking each other what was their poison. So I learnt that they had spoken the truth. I had driven them to drink. And according to Tom the drink at this particular bar is superior to strychnine. He says men always take it in preference."
Driven to Drink.
"And have you then finally decided to abandon Platonics?" asked Lillie, when the flow of words came to an end.
"Finally."
"And you have decided to enroll in our ranks?"