"Consuelo wasn't made for a comfortable happiness, you understand. But neither was she strange, nor exotic, nor bizarre, nor Belladonnaish, nor any of those things that make a man think twice before introducing a woman to a superior sister at the Bath Club--but even so no man, unless he were a Tristram Carew, would too easily dare to marry her. I don't know why, but it was so, for since she divorced Carew she has had the pick of a thousand lovers, but not of many solid husbands. It sounds a cruel thing to say, but I don't mean it cruelly; it is just interesting as an instance of the curiously similar effect which one woman may have on a thousand different, very different men. You just loved her--and if you weren't turned down at the start you were certain to be turned down after a while; and then you went your way, and you knew why Menelaus had made such a nuisance of himself about Helen, for, like him, you had known, and loved, and had been loved by a marvellous woman; but, unlike that persistent Argive, you dimly realised that if she turned you down in the quick end, then that was probably your fault--and, anyway, it is only an indecent sort of man who quibbles about the pain after the pleasure. And for many years after that, long after you had married a steady young woman, you were Consuelo's devoted friend--and, by God, she was your devoted friend too! I never knew a woman break so many hearts and patch up so many quarrels as Consuelo; but it is generally the sort of woman who looks on fidelity and infidelity as moods rather than principles who makes the truest and sincerest friend.... "But I envied my friend Carew overmuch, as even my English denseness about these things found out soon enough. She loved him for six months, and she detested him for years. And she grew to hate him so bitterly that Tristram Carew, the most jealous and unrestrained man I ever knew, was at last persuaded to let her divorce him. For, mind you, that woman was strong. She had personality at the back of her power to charm--and a rare, dangerous kindliness which makes it impossible for one's love for her to be goaded into dislike. There wasn't a drop of affectation in her, she was just an almost perfect type of that 'modern' woman who has held her place in the life and poetry and prose of ages, from the wife of Uriah to Mary Stuart, and onwards to Consuelo; women born with just that mixture of essential breeding and adventurousness which will turn the heads of most normal and decent men, and leave them gaping and grovelling and smiling at their own damn-foolishness in thinking that such a woman could ever have loved them! I said 'normal and decent men' because it seems almost invariably to be the poor old _sahibs_ who fall in love with this type of woman--while the outsiders step in and take them, and leave them. Anyway, it seems always to be your 'manly' man who odes the grovelling and the effeminate man to be the master of women. Just a theory, of course....