“Precisely! and what do you wish to know now?”

“Whether you found any one you liked:  whether you asked her to marry you; and what she said.”

“I can tell you whether I found any one I liked, and whether I asked her to marry me:  but what she said is yet to be recorded in the book of Fate.  For ten long years I roved about, living first in one capital, then another:  sometimes in St. Petersburg; oftener in Paris; occasionally in Rome, Naples, and Florence.  Provided with plenty of money and the passport of an old name, I could choose my own society:  no circles were closed against me.  I sought my ideal of a woman amongst English ladies, French countesses, Italian signoras, and German grafinnen.  I could not find her.  Sometimes, for a fleeting moment, I thought I caught a glance, heard a tone, beheld a form, which announced the realisation of my dream:  but I was presently undeserved.  You are not to suppose that I desired perfection, either of mind or person.  I longed only for what suited me —­ for the antipodes of the Creole:  and I longed vainly.  Amongst them all I found not one whom, had I been ever so free, I —­ warned as I was of the risks, the horrors, the loathings of incongruous unions —­ would have asked to marry me.  Disappointment made me reckless.  I tried dissipation —­ never debauchery:  that I hated, and hate.  That was my Indian Messalina’s attribute:  rooted disgust at it and her restrained me much, even in pleasure.  Any enjoyment that bordered on riot seemed to approach me to her and her vices, and I eschewed it.

“Yet I could not live alone; so I tried the companionship of mistresses.  The first I chose was Celine Varens —­ another of those steps which make a man spurn himself when he recalls them.  You already know what she was, and how my liaison with her terminated.  She had two successors:  an Italian, Giacinta, and a German, Clara; both considered singularly handsome.  What was their beauty to me in a few weeks?  Giacinta was unprincipled and violent:  I tired of her in three months.  Clara was honest and quiet; but heavy, mindless, and unimpressible:  not one whit to my taste.  I was glad to give her a sufficient sum to set her up in a good line of business, and so get decently rid of her.  But, Jane, I see by your face you are not forming a very favourable opinion of me just now.  You think me an unfeeling, loose-principled rake:  don’t you?”

“I don’t like you so well as I have done sometimes, indeed, sir.  Did it not seem to you in the least wrong to live in that way, first with one mistress and then another?  You talk of it as a mere matter of course.”

“It was with me; and I did not like it.  It was a grovelling fashion of existence:  I should never like to return to it.  Hiring a mistress is the next worse thing to buying a slave:  both are often by nature, and always by position, inferior:  and to live familiarly with inferiors is degrading.  I now hate the recollection of the time I passed with Celine, Giacinta, and Clara.”