“Thirty-three is hardly middle-age,” said Kenrick. “I was thinking of the chilly forties. Besides, you can’t compare women with men in this matter. The old saw about a woman being as old as she looks and a man as old as he feels is always used by women as an illustration of the advantage of being a man. As a matter of fact, the advantage lies all the other way. It is so much easier to look young than to feel young. A woman is never too old to be loved. You can hardly maintain that a man is never to old to love. I doubt if a man over thirty ever knows what love means.” “Och, I never heard such a preposterous statement,” Nancy declared. “Why, think of the men who cherish hopeless passions all their lives.” “For my part I can never understand a man’s cherishing a hopeless passion,” he declared. “I should feel so utterly humiliated by a woman’s refusal of her love that my own passion would be killed by it instantly. And the humiliation would be deepened by my knowledge of woman’s facility for falling in love, which is, of course, much greater than a man’s, as much greater as her fastidiousness and sensitiveness are less. To be refused by a woman, when one sees on what monstrous objects she is prepared to lavish her affection, seems to me terrible. Equally I do not understand why a woman, who after her childhood so rarely cherishes a hopeless passion that will never be returned, is always prepared to cherish the much more hopeless passion of continuing to love a man after he has ceased to love her. I suppose it’s because women are such sensualists. They always regard love as a gratification of self too long postponed, and they continue to want it as children want broken toys and men fail to give up smoking. The famous women who have held men have held them by their infinite variety. Yet the one quality in a lover that a woman finds it hardest to forgive is his variety.” “Och, I don’t agree at all,” Nancy declared breathlessly. “In fact I don’t agree with anything you’ve said about love or men or women. I think it’s a great pity that you have let yourself grow middle-aged. You wouldn’t be able to have all these ideas if you were still capable of feeling genuine emotion. I’m not clever enough to argue with you properly. No woman ever can argue, because either she feels so strongly about a subject that all her reasons fly to the wind, or, if she doesn’t feel strongly, she doesn’t think it worth while to argue and, in fact, finds it a boring waste of time. But I feel that you are utterly wrong. I know you are. You’re just wrong. And that’s all there is to be said. My husband had more variety than any man I ever knew, and I loved his variety as much as I loved every other single one of his qualities.”