“Whereas I, alas! have a preference for women who care for nothing very much.”
“Yet I know you have been moody of late.”
“And you are right: yes, I have.”
“Well, what was it that troubled your Olympian calm? The parting scene—tears—upbraiding?”
“Pas le moins du monte. She went away without uttering a word.”
“Then what was it?”
“That I have simply lost my belief in the last dogma left to me from childhood. Everybody complains that women are too devoid of heart and brains and soul; and I now find that it is in vain I have sought for a woman bereft of those superfluous appendages.”
“But Helen, as I understood, answered your ideal of a woman to perfection?”
“I fondly thought she did. Oh, you cannot imagine what I would give to meet a woman really soulless, primitive: you know,—a creature absolutely and bewilderingly unenlightened.”
“Really, I quite dislike you to-day, Stephen. You are positively in bad form!”