"'You can't run a team,' I had said to her bitterly at the opening performance, as it were, of my dangerous state. And, mind you, I thought I had some right to my bad temper, because all this time she had been saying that she loved me--but, but, but the memory of her love for Tristram was so recent, and remembering how utterly she had loved him made her cautious of trusting too blindly to this repetition of that same emotion; 'for it seems quite the same, so I suppose that I must love you,' she said so sweetly that I can't blame Jupiter for withholding his thunderbolt. If I would only wait.... But I had, and wouldn't any more. "Those two sour weeks contained the last phase of the game. I was fixing her down to that eternal 'something definite,' and I took a real, cruel pleasure in frightening her--for she was fond enough of me to be frightened at my strange lapse from the door-mat, ox-eyed amiability to which I had so far treated her. That was the only time I was ever near to being top-dog in the affair, those two weeks when I had her in a corner and made her gradually realise that it must be 'one thing or the other'; and that, best weapon of all for such a woman, I was past the stage when I would mind very much if it was 'the other.' She knew that I had the bit in my teeth and was going to run away, even if I had to live as a celibate ever after--which, believe me, is what I seriously told her I must become! "I say that she was frightened at my sudden twist, but I am not at all sure if it was fright; it may have been just a pretty pretence of it, for she was too polished, too 'right,' to let an old friend go without showing him that she would miss him--'so marvellously much, you dear!' "But, fright or pretence, no regrets at losing me could influence her in the least to yield to what, when the time came with some luckier wretch, she would yield with such whole-hearted abandon that I can quite understand how she sincerely thought, and sometimes said, that each new lover was her last and ultimate fate....