As for her, I didn't dare look at her, I was so embarrassed. But when at last, as tea was served, I did look, she smiled at me, and I knew that her smile was to say, "This is your punishment for breaking your oath. I am so sorry...." The husband did not stay for more than five minutes; obviously he did not wish to intrude. But before he left us he turned to me, and with the most charming deference, said: "You will find everything arranged. Madame will explain. I beg you to accept my sincerest wishes for your happiness." And then his lips touched her fingers, and he left us--to let himself be divorced so that Madame could marry me, who had never dared even to dream of such supreme happiness. And so it was that we married. "'I am sorry to be so tiresome and detailed, but the worst is over. For the rest of my tale is a commonplace in the history of the world--you realise? She tired of me. Gently, but remorselessly. As such wonderful women will, you know. It is no use kicking--no man, neither Hector, nor Adonis, nor Machiavelli, can supply the deficiencies of the sphinx. She smiles and says "no," she says "no" even to the wisdom of Solomon, and besotted man sprawls at her feet and murmurs frantically that, anyway, it is better to be miserable about her than to be happy about any one else.... Yes, my friend, men have been known to say that to women. I myself have said it more than once, but I only believed it once. That was two years ago. But it was no use, her love was as dead as though it had never been--I was a man, I had become a God, and now I was a man again. And so the revolt of man ended in submission, and I had to acquiesce in her mere affection for me--that affection with which all splendid women enshroud their dead loves. And how much in oneself dies with their dead love! Why, there dies the ritual of love, the sacrament of sex! for sex can be exalted to a sacrament only once in a lifetime, for the rest it's just a game, an indoor sport.... "'You see, such women as she make their own laws. It is not her fault, nor her arrogance, it is ours, who are so consistently susceptible. Physically she belongs to the universe, not to one single man. She never belonged to me, I was just an expression of the world to her. She has never belonged to any one, she never will--for she is in quest of the ideal which even she will never find. And so she will go on, testing our--our quality and breaking our hearts. Men have killed themselves because of her, poor dear, and I too would have considered it seriously if I had not found that she ranked suicide high in the list of supreme impoliteness from men to women.