"A 'case'? You mean a marriage? Oh dear no! Jocelyn isn't a marrying man."
"Isn't she a little—er—well!—a little taken with him?"
"Perhaps! Very likely! Clever women are always fools on one point—if not on several!"
"And he? Isn't he very attentive?"
"Not more so than he has been and is to dozens of other women. He's too clever to show her any special attention—it might compromise him. He's a man that takes care of Number One!"
So the gossip ran,—and only Jocelyn himself caught wind of it sufficiently to set him thinking. His "affaire de coeur" had gone far enough,—and he realised that the time had come for him to beat a retreat. But how to do it? The position was delicate and difficult. If Innocent had been an ordinary type of woman, vain and selfish, fond of frivolities and delighting in new conquests, his task would have been easy,—but with a girl who believed in love as the ultimatum of all good, and who trusted her lover with implicit faith as next in order of worship to God, what was to be done?
"We talk a vast amount of sentimental rubbish about women being pure and faithful!" he soliloquised—"But when they ARE pure and faithful we are more bored with them than if they were the worst women in town!"
He had however one subject of congratulation for which he metaphorically patted himself on the back as being "a good boy"—he had not gone to such extremes in his love-affair as could result in what is usually called "trouble" for the girl. He had left her unscathed, save in a moral and spiritual sense. The sweet body, with its delicate wavering tints of white and rose was as the unspoilt sheath of a lily-bud,—no one could guess that within the sheath the lily itself was blighted and slowly withering. One may question whether it is not a more cruel thing to seduce the soul than the body,—to crush all the fine faiths and happy illusions of a fair mind and leave them scorched by a devastating fire whose traces shall never be obliterated. Amadis de Jocelyn would have laughed his gayest and most ironical laugh at the bare possibility of such havoc being wrought by the passion of love alone.
"What's the use of loving or remembering anything?" he would exclaim—"One loves—one tires of love!—and by-and-by one forgets that love ever existed. I look forward to the time when my memory shall dwell chiefly on the agreeable entremets of life—a good dinner—a choice cigar! These things never bother you afterwards,—unless you eat too much or smoke too much,—then you have headache and indigestion—distinctly your own fault! But if you love a woman for a time and tire of her afterwards she always bothers you!—reminding you of the days when you 'once' loved her with persistent and dreadful monotony! I believe in forgetting,—and 'letting go.'"
With these sentiments, which were the true outcome of his real self, it was not and never would be possible for him to conceive that with certain high and ultra-sensitive natures love is a greater necessity than life itself, and that if they are deprived of the glory they have been led to imagine they possessed, nothing can make compensation for what to them is eternal loss, coupled with eternal sorrow.