'Of repletion, unquestionably. Of a fit of indigestion he perishes never to rise again. Starved, he will linger on sometimes for a very long while indeed, and at the first glance of pity revives in full vigour.'

'Why, then, do women usually commit the error of surfeiting him? For I agree with you that a surfeit is fatal.'

'Because most women cannot be brought to understand that too much of themselves may bring about a wayward wish to have none of them. They call this natural and inevitable reaction ingratitude and inconstancy, but it is nothing of the kind; it is only human nature.'

'Male human nature. The wish for pastures new, characteristic of cattle, sheep and man.'

'"La femme est si souvent trompée parce qu'elle prend le désir pour l'amour." Someone wrote that; I forget who did, but it is entirely true. Une bouffée de désir, an hour's caprice, a swift flaming of mere animal passion which flares up and dies down like any shooting star, seems to a woman to be the ideal love of romance and of tragedy. She dreams of Othello, of Anthony, of Stradella, and all the while it is Sir Harry Wildair, or Joseph Surface, or at the best of things Almaviva. She is ready for the tomb in Verona, but he is only ready for the chambre meublée, or at most for the saison aux eaux.'

'Is she always ready for the tomb in Verona?' asked a sceptical voice. 'Does she not sometimes, even very often, marry Paris, and "carry on" with Romeo? If I may be allowed to say so, there are a few impassioned and profound temperaments in the world to many light ones; the bread and the sack are, as usual, unevenly apportioned, but these graver and deeper natures are not all necessarily feminine. It is when you have two great and ardent natures involved (and then alone) that you get passion, high devotion, tragedy; but this conjunction is as rare as the passing of Venus across the sun. Usually Romeo throws himself away on some Lady Frivolous, and Juliet breaks her heart for some fop or some fool.'

'That is only because all human life is a game of cross purposes; one only wonders who first set the game going, to amuse the gods or make them weep.'

'That question will scarcely come under the head of amatory analysis. Besides, the world has been wondering about that ever since the beginning of time, and has never received any answer to its queries.'

'If a quotation be allowed,' suggested the ecclesiastic, 'in lieu of an original opinion, I would beg leave to recall the Prince de Ligne's "Dans l'amour il n'y a que les commencements qui sont charmants." In the middle of the romance I see you all yawn, at the end you usually quarrel. Some wise man—I forget who—has said that it requires much more talent and much more feeling to break off an attachment amiably than to begin it.'