"Of course I have. Lots of times. I always begin like that—in fact, I've never had an affair which didn't begin with my being down and under. I am so frightfully impressionable....
"You see," she touched my arm, "I am rather a quick person. I mean I fall in love, or whatever you call my sort of emotion, quickly. While the man is just beginning to think that I've got rather nice eyes, and that I'm perhaps more amusing than the damfool women he's known so far, I'm frantically in love. I do all my grovelling then. And, Dikran! if you could only see me, if you could only be invisible and see me loving a man more than he loves me—you simply wouldn't know me. And I make love awfully well, in my quiet sort of way, much better than any man—and different love-speeches to every different man, too! I say the divinest things to them—and quite seriously, thank God! The day I can't fall in love with a man seriously, and tell him he's the only man I've ever really loved, and really believe it when I'm saying it—the day I can't do that I shall know I'm an old, old woman, too old to live any more."
"Then, of course, you will die?" I suggested.
"Of course I will die," she said. "But not vulgarly—I mean I won't make a point of it, and feel a fat coroner's eyes on my body as my soul goes up to Gabriel. I shall die in my bed, of a broken heart. My heart will break when I begin to fade. I shall die before I have faded...."
"No, you won't, Shelmerdene," I said. "Many women have sworn that, from Theodosia to La Pompadour, but they have not died of broken hearts because they never realised when they began to fade, and no man ever dared tell them, not even a Roi Soleil."
"Oh, don't be pedantic, Dikran, and don't worry me about what other women will or won't do. You will be quoting the 'Dolly Dialogues' at me next, and saying 'Women will be women all the world over.'
"It is always like that about me and men," she said. "I burn and burn and fizzle out. And all the time the man is wondering if I am playing with him or not, if it is worth his while to fall in love with me or not—poor pathos, as if he could help it in the end! And then, at last, when he realises that he is in love, he begins to say the things I had longed for him to say four weeks before; every Englishman in love is simply bound to say, at one time or another, that he would adore to lie with his beloved in a gondola in Venice, looking at the stars; any Englishman who doesn't say that when he is in love is a suspicious character, and it will probably turn out that he talks French perfectly.
"And when at last he has fallen in love," she said dreamily, "he wants me to run away with him, and he is very hurt and surprised when I refuse, and pathetically says something 'about my having led him to expect that I loved him to death, and would do anything for or with him.' The poor little man doesn't know that he is behind the times, that he could have done anything he liked with me the first week we met, when I was madly in love with him, that when I was dying for him to ask me to go away with him, and would gladly have made a mess of my life at one word from him—but four weeks later I would rather have died than go away with him.
"Only once," she said, "I was almost beaten. I fell in love with a stone figure. Women are like sea-gulls, they worship stone figures.... I went very mad, Dikran. He told me that he didn't deserve being loved by me—he admired me tremendously, you see—because he hadn't it in his poor soul to love any one. He simply couldn't love, he said ... and he felt such a brute. He said that often, poor boy—he felt such a brute! He passed a hand over his forehead and, with a tragic little English gesture, tried to be articulate, to tell me how intensely he felt that he was missing the best things in life, and yet couldn't rectify it, because .... 'Oh, my dear, I'm a hopeless person!' he said despairingly, and I forgot to pity myself in pitying him.
"But he got cold again. He weighed his words carefully: No, he liked me as much as he could like any one, but he didn't think he loved me—mark that glorious, arrogant think, Dikran!... He was very ambitious; with the sort of confident, yet intensive, nerve-racking ambition which makes great men. Very young, very wonderful, brilliantly successful in his career at an age when other men were only beginning theirs—an iron man, with the self-destructive selfishness of ice, which freezes the thing that touches it, but itself melts in the end.... He froze me. Don't think I'm exaggerating, please, but, as he spoke—it was at lunch, and a coon band was playing—I died away all to myself. I just died, and then came to life again, coldly, and bitterly, and despairingly, but still loving him.... I couldn't not love him, you see. His was the sort of beauty that was strong, and vital, and a little contemptuous, and with an English cleanness about it that was scented.... I am still loyal to my first despairing impression of him. And I knew that I was really in love with him, because I couldn't bear the idea of ever having loved any one else. I was sixteen again, and worshipped a hero, a man who did things.