“Women take love so seriously,” he said--“it is women who spoil it.... Love is the pastime of life, the gaiety of days, a thing to enrich the senses, to give man his recreation--and women filch it of the very essence of its charm by making it the sordid business of life. Robbed of its delicate mysteries, of its butterfly flitting from flower to flower, it becomes--marriage--and the begetting of children--and the clamour of household needs--and milk-bottles--and soiled linen.... Why are you not content to love many men, Hélène, as I have found the rhapsody of life in loving many women?... It is the spiritual----” “The spiritual!” She laughed a little harsh laugh; and added sharply: “Come, master Aubrey--we know each other too well to make it worth while to lie--it deceives neither ourselves nor the other; wherefore then the intention of it?... I would only ask you not to love the other woman _before_ me----” She was seized with a violent fit of coughing. “Come,” she said hoarsely, “this air is killing me--I must have warmth--I am starving, body and soul.” “The tavern of _The Golden Sun_ does not close till daybreak,” he said sullenly. She laughed sadly: “Yes,” she said--“they turn life upside down--the artists--like the religious....” She sighed consent. “All right. We will go there.” They passed Noll, where he leaned against the parapet of the bridge, almost touching him. He roused moodily and followed the sound of their footsteps in the pitchy murk. He, too, would go to the tavern of _The Golden Sun_. He turned to his left as he stepped off the bridge, and kept by the river-wall. There came to him now and then through the clammy darkness ahead the sound of the girl’s coughing. This woman was Hélène, the fragile beauty whom Aubrey had filched from her easy-going husband, a young doctor of the commercial quarter across the river. In the letter she had written to bid the honest commonplace fellow farewell (Aubrey had told it at a tavern merry-making amidst the sly laughter of his fellows) she had complained that he had no romance, that the very soles of his thick and clumsy boots were like his own solid soul, an offence to her sense of the subtleties--that she must out into the world to seek romance and the colour of life. The blow had fallen out of a serene day in the face of the poor fellow, and it was matter of common report that he had reeled from it--he, being unpoetical and unappreciative of the picturesque glamour of wickedness, had not even appreciated that he was party to a romance--had taken instead to avoiding his fellows and was walking with Shame--furtively, unheroically. Paris had laughed. And the girl---- She was getting her fill of crude adventure now.... Out of the reek there came again to Noll the pitiful cough. The footsteps stopped for awhile. A quickly suppressed sob. Again footsteps.