"Why, my dear fellow, that is just why I complain: she loved me too much for me ever to have made her my wife. In the opinion of every man of sense, a lawful wife should be a gentle and placid helpmeet, an Englishwoman to the very depths of her being, not very susceptible to love, incapable of jealousy, fond of sleep, and sufficiently addicted to the excessive use of black tea to keep her faculties in a conjugal state. With that Portuguese girl, ardent of heart, active, accustomed from childhood to constant change of abode, to unrestrained manners, liberal ideas, and all the dangerous opinions that a woman picks up while travelling all over the world, I should have been the most miserable, if not the most ridiculous of husbands. For fifteen months I was blind to the inevitable misery that that love was brewing for me. I was so young then! I was only twenty-two; remember that, Henry, and do not condemn me. I opened my eyes at last, just when I was about to commit the signal folly of marrying a woman who was madly in love with me. I halted on the brink of the precipice, and I fled in order not to succumb to my weakness." "Hypocrite!" said Henry, "Lavinia told me the story very differently: it seems that, long before the heartless resolution that sent you off to Italy with Rosmonda, you had already tired of the poor Jewess, and that you cruelly made her sensible of the _ennui_ that overpowered you when you were with her. Oh! when Lavinia tells about that, she displays no self-conceit, I assure you; she avows her unhappiness and your cruelty with an artless modesty which I have never noticed in other women. She has a way of her own of saying: 'In a word, I bored him.'--I tell you, Lionel, if you had heard her say those words, with the accent of ingenuous melancholy that she puts into them, I'll wager that you would have felt the stings of remorse." "Ah! have I never felt them!" cried Lionel. "That is what disgusts a man still more with a woman--all that he has to suffer on her account after he leaves her, the thousand and one annoyances caused by the haunting memory of her, the voice of bourgeois society crying for revenge and shrieking curses, the disturbed and frightened conscience, and the exceedingly gentle but exceedingly cruel reproaches which the poor abandoned creature heaps upon him through the hundred voices of rumor. I tell you, Henry, I know nothing more wearisome or more depressing than the trade of a lady-killer." "To whom are you talking?" retorted Henry grandiloquently, with that ironical, conceited gesture which became him so well. But his companion did not deign to smile, and continued to ride on slowly, letting his reins lie on his horse's neck, and resting his wearied eyes on the charming panorama which the valley unrolled at his feet.