“You can tell me, at least, that my instinct was right.”

“Which one?  A woman has so many.”

“That you love Lola Brandt.”

I lifted my arms in a helpless gesture and let them drop to my sides.

“One is not one’s own master in these things.”

“Then you do?”

“Yes,” said I in a low voice.

Eleanor drew a long breath, turned and sat down again on the sofa.

“And she knows it?”

“I have told her so.”

“Then why in the world has she run away?”

“Because you two wonderful and divinely foolish people have been too big for each other.  While you were impressed by one quality in her she was equally impressed by another in you.  She departed, burning her ships, so as to go entirely out of my life for the simple reason, as she herself expresses it, that she was not fit to black your boots.  So,” said I, taking her left hand in mine and patting it gently, “between you two dear, divine angel fools, I fall to the ground.”

A while later, just before we parted, she said in her frank way: 

“I know many people would say I’ve behaved with shocking impropriety—­immodestly and all that.  You don’t, do you?  I believe half the unhappiness in life comes from people being afraid to go straight at things.  Perhaps I’ve gone too straight this time—­but you’ll forgive me?”

I smiled and squeezed her hand.  “My dear,” said I, “Lola Brandt was right.  You are God’s good angel.”

I went away in a chastened mood, no longer wrathful, for what could woman do more for mortal man than what Eleanor Faversham had attempted?  She had gone to see whether she should stand against her rival, and with a superb generosity, unprecedented in her sex, she had withdrawn.  The magnanimity of it overwhelmed me.  I walked along the street exalting her to viewless pinnacles of high-heartedness.  And then, suddenly, the Devil whispered in my ear that execrated word “eumoiriety.”  It poisoned the rest of the day.  It confirmed my conviction of the ironical designs of Destiny.  Destiny, not content with making me a victim of the accursed principle in my own person, had used these two dear women as its instruments in dealing me fresh humiliation.  Where would it end?  Where could I turn to escape such an enemy?  If I had been alone in green fields instead of Sloane Square, I should have clapped my hands to my head and prayed God not to drive me crazy.  I should have cried wild vows to the winds and shaken my fist at the sky and rolled upon the grass and made a genteel idiot of myself.  Nature would have understood.  Men do these things in time of stress, and I was in great stress.  I loved a woman for the first time in my life—­and I was a man nearly forty.  I wanted her with every quivering nerve in me.  And she was gone.  Lost in the vast expanse of Europe with a parcel of performing cats.  Gone out of my life loving me as I loved her, all on account of this Hell-invented principle.  Ye gods!  If the fierce, pure, deep, abiding love of a man for a woman is not a reality, what in this world of shadows is anything but vapour?  I grasped it tight, hugged it to my bosom—­and now she was gone, and in my ears rang the derisive laughter of the enemy.