‘As you say,’ admitted Mrs. Mimburn knowingly, ‘one can never tell. The strangest things one hears! Quite old men, too--so very funny! There was Lord Bennington; they say he wanted to run away with Marie de Lorraine--seventy, if he is a day, La-la, and eight grandchildren. Dear me, yes; one can never prophesy what a man will do. Only be ever so little polite to one, and the next minute--well, I suppose it is human nature, after all.’ She sighed coyly, as one whose virtue is for ever being besieged. ‘Even my own dear husband,’ continued Lady Adela, ‘the best and most devoted of men, had had his moments of madness--really, one can call it nothing else, can one, Min? You remember how good and orderly James always was? Nothing seemed able to excite him, and though I am sure he loved me most warmly, still--well, it wasn’t at all _public_, Minnie. And yet, you know, there was a Frenchwoman, or something dreadful like that, whom James quite lost his head over, so I am told, before he met me. Perfectly crazy, they say he was, and when she was drowned he wanted to commit suicide. Now, could anything sound more unbelievable, Min?’ ‘I have heard about it,’ replied Mrs. Mimburn; ‘one of those ridiculous affairs I was talking of. Poor, sober, straightforward, stodgy, bourgeois James, and some terrible creature with padded hips and a French walk. That is just what happens. Your nonconformist, your decent provincial, always gets caught by the most brazen _horizontale_. James was absolutely idiotic about it, so people told me--met her--now, where did he meet her?--anyway, he suddenly made himself more absurd than a schoolboy--and I could tell you stories of _them_, La-la--fell in love with her at first sight, and talked the most amazing nonsense you can imagine. She was his affinity, if you please, the other half of his soul, the lost love of a century ago. And all this from sober old James. She must have been a shameless creature, too--but they always are, _ces dames_; for she seems to have met him--well, quite half-way, and encouraged his monstrous craze. And then she was most mercifully drowned, and after a week of sheer madness, James calmed down into his right mind again, and was only too glad to marry a nice quiet girl like you, La-la. Now, that just shows. If there ever was a person whom one would have thought perfectly safe from a passion like that, the person was our decent, beef-eating James. But no, one can never count on a man. Nine out of ten of the men we marry, however placid and devoted they may be, have had some dreadful insane romance in their lives, La-la. One knows what it is to be a man’s romance one’s self, and, dear me, it’s not by any means the same thing as being a man’s wife!’