But Burns’s tenderness, even for the women who meant most to him, was often of a peculiar sort. Though he told Deborah Davies that ‘Woman is the blood-royal of life; let there be slight degrees of precedency among them, but let them all be sacred’, his practice was more accurately summarized in what he said about love in confiding to George Thomson his admiration for Jean Lorimer: ‘... I am a very Poet in my enthusiasm of the Passion.--The welfare & happiness of the beloved Object, is the _first & inviolate_ sentiment that pervades my soul; & whatever pleasures I might wish for, or whatever might be the raptures they would give me, yet, if they interfere & clash with that _first_ principle, it is having these pleasures at a dishonest price; & Justice forbids, & Generosity disdains the purchase!--As to the herd of the Sex, who are good for little or nothing else, I have made no such agreement with myself; but where the Parties are capable of, & the Passion is, the true Divinity of love--the man who can act otherwise than as I have laid down, is a Villain!--’ One fears that Burns remained on these chivalrous heights only when the woman was unattainable; should she yield to him, she would too readily take her place among ‘the herd of the Sex’. Certainly he freely discussed his loves not only among his male friends but with a patroness like Mrs. Dunlop. When, for instance, after his conquering hero’s return to Mauchline in June, 1787, the Armours bade him welcome and Jean succumbed once more, he lost no time in reporting the victory to Smith and Ainslie. To put it briefly, beneath the veneer of sentiment, beneath even the poetic response, Burns’s attitude towards women of his own age was the elemental possessiveness which regards sex primarily as a ribald jest. His sincerest tenderness belonged to no woman as deeply as it did to his children, however or wherever begotten.