But how can a man ever get a whole perspective of another without, as it were, the bedroom key to his passions? _In vino veritas_ may be a good enough test of drunkards by topers, but _in amore veritas_ is surely the very secret of the sphinx, be he drunk or sober. I once heard it said of a popular French Society _abbé_ that "there's no man in France who is more confided in by people who hate each other"; and at the time I thought rather dismally that I had missed my vocation--for, in my small way, the same has happened to me throughout my life; and had I had an orderly mind I might have weaved the intricacies of other peoples' emotions into a famous book, instead of letting them settle into the deplorable chaos which they have always been. But I do know this, that I would know even less than I do of women if I had ever listened to what men said of them, and nothing at all of men if I hadn't listened very attentively to what women said of them. But Iris said almost nothing at all to explain the perversities of this particular man; except, once, that his nerves were as tight and taut as violin strings, and "sometimes so suddenly tuneless that it is difficult to remember what a very precious violin it really is." In spite of the fact that her mother was passing a very pleasant middle age in widely bewailing that Iris was wasting her youth, that Iris didn't like nor love any one, not even her husband--"that child doesn't like any one, you know! She is so contemptuous!" she'd say brilliantly--Iris, under a becoming air of inaccessibility which could rather appall one, hid an ability to love utterly--such as would quite have shocked those who inveighed against her coldness! And perhaps that hidden warmth of desire in her, the human but divine possibility of absolute surrender, must have been why her very presence in a room so often disturbed one. And now, to Roger! She had given it all to him, the whole surrender--that thing, so warmly full of potentiality, had been all given to him. A marvellous box of tricks to open, each passion to unwind its mystic and craved-for gift! If only he could have taken her love but a tithe so generously as she had given it! And she never dreaming that he wouldn't....