"And when at last he has fallen in love," she said dreamily, "he wants me to run away with him, and he is very hurt and surprised when I refuse, and pathetically says something 'about my having led him to expect that I loved him to death, and would do anything for or with him.' The poor little man doesn't know that he is behind the times, that he could have done anything he liked with me the first week we met, when I was madly in love with him, that when I was dying for him to ask me to go away with him, and would gladly have made a mess of my life at one word from him--but four weeks later I would rather have died than go away with him. "Only once," she said, "I was almost beaten. I fell in love with a stone figure. Women are like sea-gulls, they worship stone figures.... I went very mad, Dikran. He told me that he didn't deserve being loved by me--he admired me tremendously, you see--because he hadn't it in his poor soul to love any one. He simply couldn't love, he said ... and he felt such a brute. He said that often, poor boy--he felt such a brute! He passed a hand over his forehead and, with a tragic little English gesture, tried to be articulate, to tell me how intensely he felt that he was missing the best things in life, and yet couldn't rectify it, because .... 'Oh, my dear, I'm a hopeless person!' he said despairingly, and I forgot to pity myself in pitying him. "But he got cold again. He weighed his words carefully: No, he liked me as much as he could like any one, but he didn't _think_ he loved me--mark that glorious, arrogant _think_, Dikran!... He was very ambitious; with the sort of confident, yet intensive, nerve-racking ambition which makes great men. Very young, very wonderful, brilliantly successful in his career at an age when other men were only beginning theirs--an iron man, with the self-destructive selfishness of ice, which freezes the thing that touches it, but itself melts in the end.... He froze _me_. Don't think I'm exaggerating, please, but, as he spoke--it was at lunch, and a coon band was playing--I died away all to myself. I just died, and then came to life again, coldly, and bitterly, and despairingly, but still loving him.... I couldn't _not_ love him, you see. His was the sort of beauty that was strong, and vital, and a little contemptuous, and with an English cleanness about it that was scented.... I am still loyal to my first despairing impression of him. And I knew that I was really in love with him, because I couldn't bear the idea of ever having loved any one else. I was sixteen again, and worshipped a hero, a man who did things.