Of late years Madame Steynlin had given up marrying, having at last, after many broken hopes, definitely convinced herself that husbands were only after her money. Rightly or wrongly, she wanted to be loved for herself; loved, she insisted, body and soul. Even as the fires of Erebus slumber beneath their mantle of ice, she concealed, under a varnish of conventionality--the crust was not so thick in her case--a nature throbbing with passion. She was everlastingly unappeased, because incurably romantic. All life, she truly declared, is a search for a friend. Unfortunately she sought with her eyes open, having never grasped the elementary truth that to find a friend one must close one eye: to keep him--two. She always attributed to men qualities which, she afterwards discovered, they did not possess. Her life since the marrying period had been a breathless succession of love affairs, each more eternal than the last. In matters such as these, Madame Steynlin was the reverse of the Duchess. True to her ideal of La Pompadour, that lady did not mind how many men danced attendance on her--the more the merrier. Nor did she bother about their ages; for all she cared, they might be, and often were, the veriest crocks. She was rather particular, however, about stiff collars and things; the appearance and conversation of her retinue, she avowed, should be of the kind to pass muster in good society. Madame Steynlin liked to have not more than one man escorting her at a time, and he should be young, healthy-looking, and full of life. In regard to minor matters she preferred, if anything, Byronic collars to starched ones; troubling little, for the rest, what costume her cavalier was wearing or what opinions he expressed. In fact, she liked youngsters to be frank, impetuous, extravagant in their views and out of the common rut. The two ladies had been likened to Divine and Earthly Love, or to Venus Urania and Venus Pandemos--a comparison which was manifestly unfair to both of them.