n in French
restaurants at popular Exhibitions. I don't know why I did for this man
what I'd never done for any other, Partly, I fancy, because it never
dawned upon me that he could misunderstand me. Rosamond says I
idealised him too much, and that he's just the ordinary man and not the
tiniest bit of the Bayard I imagined him. I daresay she's right, and
that he may have laughed in his sleeve at my romantic rhapsodies.

All the same, I never can convince myself that he is a mere
fortune-hunter. Perhaps the very fact that I didn't make the smallest
effort to wrest him from Mademoiselle Croesus when he tried to make me
jealous seemed proof to him that he was no more to me than a caprice.
So, when we made each other an atrocious scene and I told him to go off
to her, he simply took me at my word.

The scene began with my telling him about my sort of engagement to
Aubrey Blaine--whom as you know, I was really nearer to marrying than I
have been to marrying anybody. And yet, as I tried to explain to Will,
I didn't WANT to marry Aubrey. Only the mischief with me is always that
I can't hold back with one hand and give with the other... Will wasn't
able to enter into my feelings about that affair in the very least or
to understand how, when it came to the point, I realised that I
COULDN'T sink to domesticity on seven hundred a year. Fancy taking a
house in Pimlico or West Kensington, or one of those horrible places
with a man to whom you have a violent attraction and consulting with
your adored as to whether you could run to three maids and a Tweeny!
The sordidness of it would be too disenchanting.

When I said something like that to Will, he flared up and we hurled
nasty speeches at each other, and finally he walked off slamming the
door--I used to hear that slam in my dreams sometimes--or it may have
been Luke coming in late--the Tallants' hall door makes a particularly
Kismetish bang. That was our real parting, though it wasn't the last.
He wrote to me--a bitter sort of farewell. And I did a mad thing. I
went to see him in his rooms. But when I got there, his
manner--something he said which offended me--one can't explain the
unexplainable--started the scene all over again. It was as if a mocking
demon came up between us. That time it was I who left him. The next
thing I heard was that he and Mademoiselle Croesus were engaged.

I wrote to him--I know it wasn't the proper sort of letter--I daresay
he saw through my pretend