"I was a fool, of course--to believe him, I mean. But when women lose their heads they lose the self-confidence and pride of a lifetime, too--and, anyway, it's all rubbish about pride; there isn't any pride in absolute love. There's a name to be made out of a brilliant epigram on love and pride--think it over, Dikran.... What an utter fool I was to believe him! As he spoke, over that lunch-table, I watched his grey English eyes, which tried to look straight into mine but couldn't, because he was shy; he was trying to be frightfully honest with me, you see, and being so honest makes decent men shy. He felt such a brute, but he had to warn me that in any love affair with him, he ... yes, he did love me, in his way, he suddenly admitted. But his way wasn't, couldn't ever be, mine. He simply couldn't give himself wholly to any one, as I was doing. And he so frightfully wanted to--to sink into my love for him.... 'Shelmerdene, it's all so damnable,' he said pathetically, and his sincerity bit into me. But I had made up my mind. I was going to do the last foolish thing in a foolish life--I'm a sentimentalist, you know. "I believed him. But I clung to my pathetic love affair with both hands, so tight--so tight that my nails were white and blue with their pressure against his immobility. I made up my mind not to let go of him, however desperate, however hopeless ... it was an attempt at life. He was all I wanted, I could face life beside him. Other men had been good enough to play with, but my stone figure--why, I had been looking for him all my life! But in my dreams the stone figure was to come wonderfully to life when I began to worship it--in actual life my worshipping could make the stone figure do nothing more vital than crumble up bits of bread in a nervous effort to be honest with me! I took him at that--I told you I was mad, didn't I?--I took him at his own value, for as much as I could get out of him.