die! Are you unable to perceive how that redounds to my
discredit? You loved me, you have ceased to love me. In other words, you charge
me with incapacity to sustain a woman's love. You accuse me of inspiring a
miserable passion that cannot last a life-time! You let the world see that I am
a man to be aimed at for a temporary mark! And simply because I happen to be in
your neighbourhood at an age when a young woman is impressionable! You make a
public example of me as a man for whom women may have a caprice, but that is
all; he cannot enchain them; he fascinates passingly; they fall off. Is it just,
for me to be taken up and cast down at your will? Reflect on that scandal!
Shadows? Why, a man's shadow is faithful to him at least. What are women? There
is not a comparison in nature that does not tower above them! not one that does
not hoot at them! I, throughout my life guided by absolute deference to their
weakness - paying them politeness, courtesy - whatever I touch I am happy in,
except when I touch women! How is it? What is the mystery? Some monstrous
explanation must exist. What can it be? I am favoured by fortune from my birth
until I enter into relations with women! But will you be so good as to account
for it in your defence of them? Oh! were the relations dishonourable, it would
be quite another matter. Then they ... I could recount ... I disdain to
chronicle such victories. Quite another matter! But they are flies, and I am
something more stable. They are flies. I look beyond the day; I owe a duty to my
line. They are flies. I foresee it, I shall be crossed in my fate so long as I
fail to shun them - flies! Not merely born for the day, I maintain that they are
spiritually ephemeral. - Well, my opinion of your sex is directly traceable to
you. You may alter it, or fling another of us men out on the world with the old
bitter experience. Consider this, that it is on your head if my ideal of women
is wrecked. It rests with you to restore it. I love you. I discover that you are
the one woman I have always loved. I come to you, I sue you, and suddenly - you
have changed! I have changed: I am not the same. What can it mean? I