"Of course I have. Lots of times. I always begin like that--in fact, I've never had an affair which didn't begin with my being down and under. I am so frightfully impressionable.... "You see," she touched my arm, "I am rather a quick person. I mean I fall in love, or whatever you call my sort of emotion, quickly. While the man is just beginning to think that I've got rather nice eyes, and that I'm perhaps more amusing than the damfool women he's known so far, I'm frantically in love. I do all my grovelling then. And, Dikran! if you could only see me, if you could only be invisible and see me loving a man more than he loves me--you simply wouldn't know me. And I make love awfully well, in my quiet sort of way, much better than any man--and different love-speeches to every different man, too! I say the divinest things to them--and quite seriously, thank God! The day I can't fall in love with a man seriously, and tell him he's the only man I've ever _really_ loved, and _really_ believe it when I'm saying it--the day I can't do that I shall know I'm an old, old woman, too old to live any more." "Then, of course, you will die?" I suggested. "Of course I will die," she said. "But not vulgarly--I mean I won't make a point of it, and feel a fat coroner's eyes on my body as my soul goes up to Gabriel. I shall die in my bed, of a broken heart. My heart will break when I begin to fade. I shall die before I have faded...." "No, you won't, Shelmerdene," I said. "Many women have sworn that, from Theodosia to La Pompadour, but they have not died of broken hearts because they never realised when they began to fade, and no man ever dared tell them, not even a Roi Soleil." "Oh, don't be pedantic, Dikran, and don't worry me about what other women will or won't do. You will be quoting the 'Dolly Dialogues' at me next, and saying 'Women will be women all the world over.' "It is always like that about me and men," she said. "I burn and burn and fizzle out. And all the time the man is wondering if I am playing with him or not, if it is worth his while to fall in love with me or not--poor pathos, as if he could help it in the end! And then, at last, when he realises that he is in love, he begins to say the things I had longed for him to say four weeks before; every Englishman in love is simply bound to say, at one time or another, that he would adore to lie with his beloved in a gondola in Venice, looking at the stars; any Englishman who doesn't say that when he is in love is a suspicious character, and it will probably turn out that he talks French perfectly.