None; my mind is a blank on the subject. Stay! my mother said once, when I was a boy, "You must not believe them; all their smiles and pretty ways are only put on. Women like men only for what they can get out of them." And to these simple words I attribute all the suspicion of woman's truth which hung over my youth. For years it seemed to me impossible that women could love men. Women seemed to me so beautiful and desirable--men so hideous and revolting. Could they touch us without revulsion of feeling, could they really desire us? I was absorbed in the life of woman--the mystery of petticoats, so different from the staidness of trousers! the rolls of hair entwined with so much art, and suggesting so much colour and perfume, so different from the bare crop; the unnaturalness of the waist in stays! plenitude and slenderness of silk, so different from the stupidity of a black tail-coat; rose feet passing under the triple ruches of rose, so different from the broad foot of the male. My love for the life of women was a life within my life; and oh, how strangely secluded and veiled! A world of calm colour with phantoms moving, floating past and changing in dim light--an averted face with abundant hair, the gleam of a perfect bust or the poise of a neck turning slowly round, the gaze of deep translucid eyes. I loved women too much to give myself wholly to one. _Conscience_. Yes, yes; but what real success have you had with women? _I_. Damn it! you would not seek to draw me into long-winded stories about women--how it began, how it was broken off, how it began again? I'm not Casenova. I love women as I love champagne--I drink it and enjoy it; but an exact account of every bottle drunk would prove flat narrative. _Conscience_. You have never consulted me about your champagne loves: but you have asked me if you have ever inspired a real affection, and I told you that we cannot inspire in others what does not exist in ourselves. You have never known a nice woman who would have married you? _I_.