"'Englishmen are ice,' he remarked, 'where women are concerned. I have frequently observed it. _Sang froid_ as we say in French. The phrase must have been inspired by the contemplation of an Englishman....'
"'And we shook hands. I said nothing, which doubtless confirmed him in his illusions about us. But the point is, I was equally mistaken about him, I could not believe him capable of what we call love. I was, as I say, mistaken. But as I followed him out to the front of his house, where his patient minions waited with lanterns which shed flickering rays over enormous shrubs and about the trunks of tall cypresses, and stood at length beside a fantastic barouche, with a sleepy driver on the box, I had a moment of illumination. I asked myself why I applied this test of love to a man like him, a man in the midst of extraordinary predicaments--a man who perhaps had suffered the pangs of hell for love and had recovered, who quite possibly had run up and down the whole gamut of human emotions while I was idiotically spending my years tinkling on a couple of notes. The stupid injustice of my interior anger came home to me, and I sought again for the reason why I demanded of him my own occidental idealism. The answer struck me as unexpectedly as a sudden blow. It was because of my own attitude toward the girl. As I took my seat in the carriage and reached out mechanically to shake hands once more, I saw her as clearly as though she were there before me, the bought chattel of a cultivated polygamist, and the blood rushed to my head in a sudden surge. I leaned back as the horses started at the crack of the whip. I felt sick and humiliatingly impotent. I saw Love and Romance for what they are in this iron world of ours--ragged outcasts shivering in the streets, the abject dependents of the rich. And I saw myself for what I was, too, for the matter of that, a reed shaken by the winds of desire, an emotional somnambulist terrified at the apparition of his own destiny."
"No," said Mr. Spenlove in reply to a murmured protest, "I am not libelling humanity at all. We are a very fine lot of fellows, no doubt. As I mentioned a little while ago, the new generation seem to be a distinct advance in evolutionary types over us older and more imperfect organisms. To watch a modern youth with a woman, to hear him recount his extensive and peculiar experiences with women, to study his detached and factory-built emotions toward women--the outcome of our modern craze for quantity-production, is an instructive and somewhat alarming pastime for one weathering middle age. An improvement, of course. All progress means that, I am informed. But I am not telling you the adventures of a super-man, only a super in the play. What? No, I didn't run down love, as you call it, at all. My quarrel was not with love, or even the sexual manifestation of it which pre-occupies you all so much. I simply doubted your knowledge of it. I suggested that the majority of men never know very much about it save in a scared and furtive fashion. I hinted that you never fully realized the terrific importance of romantic ideas in the world; that you make a joke of the whole business, filling your rooms with pictures of well-nourished young women in amorous poses, filling your minds with mocking travesties and sly anecdotes of those great souls who have left us the records of their emotional storms and ship-wrecks. I am telling you the story of Captain Macedoine's daughter. Eh? Well, I am coming to that ... it seems we shall be here till morning.
