"I knew, you see, exactly what sort of a man Consuelo found dull and dismal--that is, when she was bored at home and had begun to cast her eyes abroad for her amusement; and if there is one man more than another whom a certain sort of woman finds bitterly dull, that is the friend of the husband who loves but dare not love the wife, because he is a friend of the husband--a good and sufficient reason for the likes of you and I, but not for our young woman, who finds the 'beef-and-beer' type of man quite too devastating. Of course only a very few, deplorable, charming women are like that; and we friendship-respecting men wouldn't take much notice of 'em, if they didn't, cussedly enough, happen to be the most attractive of their sex. Most women, thank the Lord, have a very real respect for men's friendships--but we are not talking of 'most women,' we are talking of Consuelo, who was neither a witch nor a whore, but whose fault and misfortune simply lay in her having no anchor in any sort of code of respectability. "To get back to the actual point (which is always the most boring part of any story, don't you think?), one somehow didn't get much 'forrarder' with the affair. She just didn't seem to love me that way, and was too much of an artist in life to deceive herself with a forced passion when she had already tasted with Tristram, and might perhaps again taste, the real, the consummate thing. We fenced with foils, then, and she had the thrills without the wounds. But it was a very special game, with very queer rules and restrictions, which I learnt from her gradually as we went along; and so played the game as well as I could, for all my deadly seriousness. But it was an unfair one, there was nothing in its rules to provide for certain contingencies which might leave one of the players helpless and beaten before the game even began; it was unfair, because, like death, it was played with loaded dice--she simply didn't love me enough!