"Faith! I am inclined to think just the opposite; for I am rather fortunate with the fair sex, and yet I love them all."
"Very good; you love them all, therefore you love none of them; which is just what I said."
"It would be a great pity, messieurs," said Edouard, "to think that a deeply rooted sentiment may not be reciprocated; and that as soon as we are really in love with a woman, she will cease to love us."
"When a man is in love, he loses all his advantages, and he is stupid enough to be carved."
"That is true," said Robineau, "he is terribly stupid."
"The woman we love doesn’t think us stupid, when she returns our love."
"Monsieur Edouard is right," said Robineau, tossing off a glass of chambertin; "when she returns our love, why, that is another matter! it is altogether different!"
"But when she doesn’t return it," said one of the young men, "then she makes sport of us and laughs at our sighs; she makes us look like downright jackasses, and we don’t discover it."
"We don’t even suspect it," said Robineau, filling his glass with chambertin again, "and that’s the amusing part of it."
"A woman, messieurs," rejoined Edouard, "who laughs at a man because he is really in love with her, such a woman is a flirt, and it seems to me that society is not made up entirely of flirts. How many passionate, loving hearts there are, ready to respond to our love! How many women who cannot help loving a scapegrace in secret, and who exert every effort to conceal what they feel!"