“As he spoke, over luncheon it was, I watched the blue eyes which tried to look straight into mine but couldn’t, because he was shy. He was trying to be honest with me, you see, and trying to be honest with women makes men shy. He felt such a brute, he kept on saying, he ... yes, he did love me in his way, he suddenly admitted. But his way wasn’t, simply couldn’t be, mine. He simply couldn’t give himself wholly to any one--and he so frightfully wanted to, he felt he was missing such lovely things! “I was a fool, of course--I mean, to believe what he said about not loving me. Oh, what an utter fool I was to believe him! But, all the same, I clung to my pathetic love-affair with both hands, ever so tight. I did indeed, Raymond. It is extraordinary how unattainable a woman can make a man she isn’t sure of! Maybe you have been unattainable to some woman, Raymond, or maybe you will be. It will be fun for you. “If it hadn’t been that my husband would not divorce me I would have dragged that lovely stone image to the altar. It would have been better so, our lives would have been quite different and perhaps quite beautiful; but what actually happened was also quite beautiful, in an irregular kind of way. “I had set out, you see, to make myself essential to him, mentally, physically, every way. If he couldn’t love me as a man loves a woman then he must love me as a tree loves the creepers that cling round it. Oh, dear, how extraordinarily silly one gets! I was terribly serious, Raymond. I always am, which is perhaps what keeps me young--but do I look young, youngish? Quick, tell me! Oh, you are sweet, Raymond! “But I hadn’t much time in which to make myself necessary to him--that young man who said he couldn’t give himself wholly to any woman, who sandwiched a woman between a dead salmon and a dead grouse! He was the eldest son of a great house, but in the meantime he was a soldier, and he had the frozen blue eyes which make a good soldier, as soldiers go--and he _was_ going, Raymond! under special orders for East Africa, where he would have to stay several months. Just a few weeks I had, then, to make him feel that he couldn’t bear life, in Africa or anywhere else, without me. And, my dear, the world didn’t hold a more perfect dream than that in which he would come to me and offer to risk his career for me! That is what is called being a cad, Raymond, and women are rather good at it. I wanted him to offer me his ambition, and then I would consider whether or not I would give it back to him. But he didn’t. I lost.