“I couldn’t bear to think of your terrible loneliness,” she went on. “I wanted you to know there was at least one person who understood.” She leaned towards me, smiling, but with lips that trembled. All at once her eyes filled with tears, her face contorted itself into the terrible grimace of misery. She made a little moaning noise and, letting herself fall forward, she hid her face against my knees. “I love you, I love you,” she repeated in a muffled voice. Her body was shaken by recurrent spasms of sobbing. I was left wondering what to do. This was not in the programme. When one goes out man-eating or pheasant-shooting, one has no business to weep over the victim. But the trouble is, of course, that the man-eater sees herself as the victim. _Hinc illae lacrimae._ It is impossible for two human beings to agree completely about anything. _Quot homines_, for now that the Dictionary of Familiar Quotations has been opened I may as well continue to make use of it, _quot homines, tot disputandum est_. There is no agreement even about the truths of science. One man is a geometrician; the other can only understand analysis. One is incapable of believing in anything of which he cannot make a working model; the other wants his truth as abstract as it is possible to make it. But when it comes to deciding which of two people is the victim and which the man-eater, there is nothing to be done but abandon the attempt. Let each party stick to his own opinion. The most successful men are those who never admit the validity of other people’s opinions, who even deny their existence. “My dear Lilian,” I said (she had insisted on my calling her Lilian within a day or two of my arrival), “my dear Lilian....” I could find nothing more to say. A successful man, I suppose, would have said something frankly brutal, something that would have made it clear to Mrs. Aldwinkle which of the two, in his opinion, was the victim and which the carnivore. I lacked the force. Mrs. Aldwinkle went on sobbing. “I love you. Couldn’t you love me a little? A little only? I would be your slave. Your slave; I’d be your slave,” she kept repeating. What things she said! I listened to her, feeling pity—yes, pity no doubt—but still more, a profound embarrassment and with it anger against the person who had thrust me into this untenable position. “It’s no good,” I protested. “It’s impossible.” She only began again, desperately. How much further the scene might have prolonged itself and what might have happened if it had been protracted, I do not know. Luckily, however, an extraordinary commotion suddenly broke loose in the hotel. Doors slammed, voices were raised, there was the noise of feet along the corridors and on the stairs. Startled and alarmed, Mrs. Aldwinkle got up, went to the door, opened it a crack and looked into the passage. Some one hurried past; hastily she closed it again. When the coast was clear, she slipped out into the passage and tiptoed away, leaving me alone.