“I am not sure,” said Zuleika, “that you are very polite. Certainly you are foolish. It is natural for boys to fall in love. If these two are in love with me, why not let them talk to me? It were an experience on which they would always look back with romantic pleasure. They may never see me again. Why grudge them this little thing?” She sipped her tea. “As for tripping them up on a threshold—that is all nonsense. What harm has unrequited love ever done to anybody?” She laughed. “Look at ME! When I came to your rooms this morning, thinking I loved in vain, did I seem one jot the worse for it? Did I look different?”
“You looked, I am bound to say, nobler, more spiritual.”
“More spiritual?” she exclaimed. “Do you mean I looked tired or ill?”
“No, you seemed quite fresh. But then, you are singular. You are no criterion.”
“You mean you can’t judge those two young men by me? Well, I am only a woman, of course. I have heard of women, no longer young, wasting away because no man loved them. I have often heard of a young woman fretting because some particular young man didn’t love her. But I never heard of her wasting away. Certainly a young man doesn’t waste away for love of some particular young woman. He very soon makes love to some other one. If his be an ardent nature, the quicker his transition. All the most ardent of my past adorers have married. Will you put my cup down, please?”
“Past?” echoed the Duke, as he placed her cup on the floor. “Have any of your lovers ceased to love you?”
“Ah no, no; not in retrospect. I remain their ideal, and all that, of course. They cherish the thought of me. They see the world in terms of me. But I am an inspiration, not an obsession; a glow, not a blight.”
“You don’t believe in the love that corrodes, the love that ruins?”
“No,” laughed Zuleika.
“You have never dipped into the Greek pastoral poets, nor sampled the Elizabethan sonneteers?”