"'Yes, loving you was certainly the last straw, Iris. And, you know, he did love you! He has told me about it since, as it's a dead thing--dead simply because Antony isn't made to love any one who can't love him. But when he met you, and hung about the street until he saw you enter Ronnie's flat--then he did love you, as he had never loved in his life, nor as he had ever thought to be able to love. If I was his first passion, you were his second and last, this hate and this love. And the passion he felt for you--maybe you would have been frightened to know of it, Iris, for Antony's were strong words--carried him quite away for those few months. There's nothing of the _femme fatale_ about you, but you've certainly got a wonderful talent for obsessing men, making them want to clutch at you with mind and body--Roger, Antony, Ronnie, and I wonder who else! And from the moment Antony met you to the moment you told him you were engaged to me he was absorbed in his passion for you--for the first time he looked to be forgetting about me, was forgetting about me. If you had loved him, Iris, he would have left me quite alone, from that time on. But between his luck and himself and you and me--he lost again. And God knows what rotten furies were added to him from that moment, always a bad loser! He had passionately longed for so many things, and passionately lost so many--and, at last, you! To him, you were his woman.... Maybe he thought he could have won you but for me; and maybe he was right, but I don't think so, for Antony was made to capture only the surface of a woman's fancy. "'But you mustn't think that he bore the least bit of resentment against you. Oh, no, you didn't come into it after that. You were just an added inch to the height of the barricade between him and happiness. But as for me.... And, do you know, so consistent was the admiration part of his hatred that he admired my being loved, or so he thought, by you! And the only letter I've ever received from Antony is one of congratulation on being engaged to such a marvellous woman. He wrote that from Mexico.