"It's possible to change one's mind."
"No. It would never even enter my head to change my mind about that."
I summed up, in a few words, one of my favourite theses: marriage in our state of civilisation is an absurdity; it would be ridiculous to chain oneself for the rest of one's life to a woman—and such a woman, a girl, a creature still in germ, who had revealed nothing of her secret. It would certainly need an artlessness to which I was no longer susceptible, or a faculty for enthusiasm still more extinct in me. Each time a friend told me of his happy engagement I gazed at him in astonishment as at a being fallen from another planet. I concluded:
"This little Landry girl is right enough to flirt with in the holidays! She's not displeasing or stupid, but I beg you to believe that there is nothing, and never will be anything between us...."
Had I convinced him? He continued after a moment's silence.
"They say ... she's well off!"
"That doesn't tempt me either."
He protested:
"My dear chap, you're very much like the rest of the world!"