"There's a lot of stuff talked about 'unrequited love,' and how men can go on loving a woman even though they get kicked downstairs by the butler every time they mention it; you know what I mean. Most men I suppose, are like you and I, we couldn't go on and on loving a woman who made simply no return for it, who 'repulsed our advances,' as it were. For one is human, after all, and, love or no love, I can't think that any woman ever repulsed a man's advances for long without, in the end, also repulsing him back to his club and his cocktails. All this, of course, is my way of telling you that Consuelo liked me well enough in her way, else I wouldn't have loved her so unwisely. Of course she liked me! What young woman won't like a young man who, without being too repulsive to look at, and with a certain reputation for polo and scholarship (as I had then), pesters her insistently with besotted but cynical attentions, in which there is no pretence of that platonic limitation which is all that any good woman should expect from her husband's best friend? "'You more than like me,' I suggested to her once, (with that conceit peculiar to gentlemen when they're alone with women who they know won't tell on them to other gentlemen) and she answered that I amused and flattered her, and that she liked my particular way of being in love--though God knows there was nothing 'particular' in it except my contemptible behaviour to Tristram. But that was said later on, for as I told you she stayed in love with her husband for a whole six months, and even then she didn't react violently, but gently--just enough to keep him in his place, and to allow her to sit up and take notice again of other young men. And as I happened to be the only other young man on the spot, in whose eyes, only too obviously to her, lurked more than the pure light of friendship, I--well, damn it, that's prologue enough, isn't it? "There wasn't the smallest jemmy missing from my burglar's outfit, you see; I had been waiting and watching, and with more cunning than you could believe possible in a common-or-garden Englishman; until one afternoon, when I was having tea with her in South Audley Street, I grabbed her up and kissed her.... "My cynicism, if it was cynicism, was born of my knowledge of Consuelo, for being in love without idealising, I really knew Consuelo. I knew her very well, what sort of a woman she was and what sort of a man she liked, and under what conditions. I had all her moods and preferences and tendencies tabulated in my mind, together with footnotes, extensions and derivations--but not possible results! Poor, poor Consuelo!