“There is no greater fallacy,” she was saying, “than the belief that women regret their youth--I mean women who have lived the life of the heart. Nature invariably compensates, and in exchanging wisdom for youth she is at her best. No woman ever crowded more into her youth--nor held to it longer--than I did, yet I can recall now the sensation of relief when I finally realized that henceforth I should live for myself alone; above all, that I had had my final disappointment. For love, my dear, is one exquisite disappointment from first to finish--for the woman, I mean. Men are rarely psychological enough for the disappointments that grind the heart of woman until it is callous. When they are, they are not able to hurt us, so may be left out of the question. The thoroughly masculine man, the only sort that is capable of inspiring the _grande passion_, because he has the primal attributes designed by Nature that he may fully mate with woman, is in the very completeness of his equipment blind to all that is most subtle and feminine in woman, giving her, therefore, twenty strokes of torment to one of happiness, or even pleasure. What is the result? We live, the most irresistible of us, three-fourths--five-eighths--of our lives alone, striving to find in imagination what man will never give us. Life, with women who are not small pieces of pulp in the domestic mill, is one long chase after happiness--what is there for most of us but happiness, politics, and charities? I have sometimes envied the women who have to work their brains blunt to fill their conservative little stomachs!” Her voice thickening, she paused to inhale the fumes of the last specific for colds. Ranata continued to stare out of the window, and her duenna continued in a moment: