"It sounds very wicked to say it, I know, but I cannot delay my confession longer. I love, I adore, I doat on wicked men, men who love not wisely but too well. When I learnt history at school I could always answer questions about the reign of Charles II., it was such a deliciously wicked period. I love Burns, Lord Byron, De Musset, Lovelace--all the nice naughty men of history or fiction. I like Ouida's guardsman, whose love is a tornado, and Charlotte Bronte's Rochester, and Byron's Don Juan. I hate, I detest milksops. And a good man always seems to me a milksop. It is a flaw--a terrible flaw in my composition, I know--but I cannot help it. It makes me miserable, but what can I do? Nature will out. "That was how I came to find George out, to discover he was not the terrible cavalier, the abandoned squire of dames the world said he was. His reputation was purely bogus. The gossips might buzz, but I had it on the highest authority. I was the first woman he had ever loved. What pleasure is there in such a conquest? It grieved me to break his heart, but I had no option. "Daythorpe was another fellow who taught me the same lesson of the purity and high emotions of his cruelly libelled sex. He, too, when driven into a corner (far from the madding crowd) confessed that I was the only woman he had ever loved. I have tried them all--poets and musicians, barristers and business-men. They all had suffered from the same incapacity for affection till they met me. It was quite pathetic to discover how truly all men were brothers. The only difference was that while some added I was the only woman they ever could love, others insisted that never man had loved before as they did now. The latter lovers always remind me of advertisers offering a superior article to anything in the trade. Nowhere could I meet the man I longed for--the man who had lived and loved. Once I felt stirrings towards a handsome young widower, but he went out of his way to assure me he had never cared for his first wife. After that, of course, he had no chance. [Illustration: _Platonic Love._]