"Then again, after those first simple six months of domesticity, something developed in Consuelo and she began to change every day; she began to grow into what she later became in the eyes of an interested public, a 'leading beauty' of the day. Leading beauties are quite common these days, one has only to sit any day in the Ritz _foyer_ at lunchtime to see a crowd of the slim, oval faced things; though God knows whom they 'lead' nowadays, unless it's photographers and publicans. But thirty or forty years ago, as you know, they were quite rare and wondrous; just three or four of 'em, and by Royal Appointment as it were, and people used to stand upon the chairs along Rotten Row to have a better view of them as they rode or walked by. Well, Consuelo began to grow up like that, and as she only too perfectly looked the part there were only a few disgruntled 'old friends' like myself who complained of the change in her, and how she was being taken from us by a crowd of deplorable women and vapid young men who ought never to have been allowed to leave school. And already, at her ridiculous age, she had a mild reputation for breaking hearts in a casual sort of way.... Tristram, of course, wasn't at all of her way of thinking, and tried to hold her back, but she just smiled at him and told him not to be silly; she had not then begun to dislike him, she felt very tenderly about him, as a woman sometimes does feel about a _ci-devant_ lover, even if he also happens to be her husband. "So, in that time of sudden development into 'the beautiful Mrs. Carew,' it wasn't unnatural that our affair remained, well, indefinite, and that from being 'the only other person' I became one of a crowd of crawling young men--and not all so very young either! I may have been a little more favoured than any one else, in fact now that I look back on it I see that I was, but at the time I didn't notice it, and I was bitter. "Thus and thus, we drifted on for about three months--until I lost my temper. At that time I had rather a good thing in the way of tempers; it didn't explode suddenly and pass away into the lumber room of past follies, but it simmered and waned and waxed and seethed for a dangerous two weeks or more--and when it died, many other things somehow died with it. My extravagant love for Consuelo Carew died with my first and last fit of brooding temper at her indecision. Indecision indeed! Poor fool that I was, I didn't see that she was undecided because she didn't love enough, and that, being the absolute slave of her emotions, her decision would be born the very same moment as her love--poor, happy devil, whoever he might be, might have been!