“Why do they love me?  I always treat them badly.  Often I don’t even pretend to love them, but it makes no difference.  Pious women, wicked women, stupid women, clever women, high-class women, low-class women, it is all the same—­all love me.  That little girl I picked up in the Strand liked me before she had been talking to me five minutes.  And what sudden fancies!  I come into a room, and every feminine eye fills with sudden emotion.  I wonder what it is.  My nose is broken, and my chin sticks out like a handle.  And men like me just as much as women do.  It is inexplicable.  True, I never say disagreeable things; and it is so natural to me to wheedle.  I twist myself about them like a twining plant about a window.  Women forgive me everything, and are glad to see me after years.  But they are never wildly jealous.  Perhaps I have never been really loved....  I don’t know though—­Lady Seeley loved me.  There was an old lady at Margate, sixty if she was a day (of course there was nothing improper), and she worshipped me.  How nicely she used to smile when she said, ’Come round here that I may look at you!’—­and her husband was quite as bad; he’d run all over the place after me.  So-and-so was quite offended because I didn’t rush to see him; he’d put me up for six months....  Servants hate Frank; for me they’d do anything.  I never was in a lodging-house in my life that the slavey didn’t fall in love with me.  People dislike me; I speak to them for five minutes, and henceforth they run after me.  I make friends everywhere.

“Those Americans wanted me to come and stay six months with them in New York.  How she did press me to come! ...  The Brookes, they want me to come and stay in the country with them; they’d give me horses to ride, guns to shoot, and I’d get the girls besides.  They looked rather greedily at me just now.  How jealous poor old Emily is of them!  She says I’d ’go to the end of the earth for them’—­and would not raise a little finger for her.  Dear old Emily, she wasn’t a bit cross the other night when I wouldn’t go home with her.  I must go and see her.  She says she loved me—­really loved me! ...  She used to lie and dream of pulling me out of burning houses.  I wonder why I am liked!  How intangible, and yet how real!  What a wonderful character I would make in a novel!”

At that moment he saw Mrs. Byril in the crowd; but notwithstanding his kind thoughts of her, he prayed she might pass without seeing him.  Perceiving Lady Helen walking with her husband and Harding, he followed her slim figure with his eyes, remembering what Seymour’s good looks had brought him, for he envied all love, desiring to be himself all that women desire.  Then his thoughts wandered.  The decoration of the Park absorbed him—­the nobility of a group of horses, the attractiveness of some dresses; and amid all this elegance and parade he dreamed of tragedy—­of some queen blowing her brains out for him—­and he saw the fashionable dress and the blood oozing from the temple, trickling slowly through the sand.  Then Lords Muchross and Snowdown passed, and they passed without acknowledging him!