Now it is of no importance to you what my employment was or how I lost it. Neither are you deeply interested in that sea upon which I spend my days, and which is to bear me away from you to-morrow. You come of inland stock, and the sea-coast of Bohemia, a coast of fairy lights and magic casements, is more in your way. But I know without asking that you will be eager to hear about the falling in love. Indeed this is the point of the story. The point is that an average young Englishman, as I was then, may quite possibly live and prosper and die, without ever getting to know anything about love at all! I told you this once, and you observed "My God! Impossible." And you added thoughtfully: "The Englishwomen--perhaps it is their fault." Well, it may be their fault, or the fault of their climate, which washes the vitality out of one, or of their religion, which does not encourage emotional adventure to any notable degree. The point is that the average young Englishman is more easily fooled about love than about anything else in the world. He accepts almost any substitute offered to him in an attractive package. I know this because I was an average young Englishman and I was extensively fooled about love. The whole social fabric of English life is engaged in manufacturing spurious counterfeits of the genuine article. And I fell, as we say in America, for a particularly cheap imitation called Ideal Love. Now you must not imagine that, because I had, as I say, fallen in love with Ideal Love, I was therefore free from the dream-woman of whom I have spoken. Not at all. She hovered in my thoughts and complicated my emotions. But I can hear you saying: "Never mind the dream-woman. Tell me about the real one, your ideal." Well, listen. She was small, thin, and of a dusky pallor, and her sharp, clever features were occasionally irradiated with a dry, satirical smile that had the cold, gleaming concentration of the beam of a searchlight. She had a large number of accomplishments, a phrase we English use in a most confusing sense, since she had never accomplished anything and never would. But the ideal part of her lay in her magnificent conviction that she and her class were the final embodiment of desirable womanhood. It was not she whom I loved. Indeed she was a rather disagreeable girl with a mania for using men's slang which she had picked up from college-boys. It was this ideal of English womanhood which deluded me, and which scared me for many years from examining her credentials.