“My age, no.  But you have the hopes of youth.  I have none.  I am banished for ever from the joys and sorrows of domestic life; and therefore, to live at all, must consecrate my soul to great abstractions and public affairs.”

“But why banished, unless self-banished?”

“Woman’s love is impossible.  You look incredulous.  I do not allude to this,” he said, taking up the empty sleeve, and by so doing sending a shiver through me.

“The loss of your arm,” I said—­and my voice trembled slightly, for I felt that a crisis was at hand—­“although a misfortune to you, would really be an advantage in gaining a woman’s affections.  Women are so romantic, and their imaginations are so easily touched!”

“Yes,” he replied bitterly; “but the trouble is that I have not lost my arm.”

I started.  He spoke bitterly, yet calmly.  I awaited his explanation in great suspense.

“To have lost my arm in battle, or even by an accident, would perhaps have lent me a charm in woman’s eyes.  But, as I said, my arm hangs by my side—­withered, unpresentable.”

I breathed again.  He continued in the same tone, and without noticing my looks.

“But it is not this which banishes me.  Woman’s love might be hoped for, had I far worse infirmities.  The cause lies deeper.  It lies in my history.  A wall of granite has grown up between me and the sex.”

“But, my dear fellow, do you—­wounded, as I presume to guess, by some unworthy woman—­extend the fault of one to the whole sex?  Do you despair of finding another true, because a first was false?”

“They are all false,” he exclaimed with energy.  “Not, perhaps, all false from inherent viciousness, though many are that, but false because their inherent weakness renders them incapable of truth.  Oh!  I know the catalogue of their good qualities.  They are often pitiful, self-devoting, generous; but they are so by fits and starts, just as they are cruel, remorseless, exacting, by fits and starts.  They have no constancy—­they are too weak to be constant even in evil; their minds are all impressions; their actions are all the issue of immediate promptings.  Swayed by the fleeting impulses of the hour, they have only one persistent, calculable motive on which reliance can always be placed—­that motive is vanity; you are always sure of them there.  It is from vanity they are good—­from vanity they are evil; their devotion and their desertion equally vanity.  I know them.  To me they have disclosed the shallows of their natures.  God! how I have suffered from them!”

A deep, low exclamation, half sob, half curse, closed his tirade.  He remained silent for a few minutes, looking on the floor, then, suddenly turning his eyes upon me, said: 

“Were you ever in Heidelberg?”

“Never.”

“I thought all your countrymen went there?  Then you will never have heard anything of my story.  Shall I tell you how my youth was blighted?  Will you care to listen?”