“I believe I am in love; it sounds rather awful, doesn’t it? but she is wondrous sweet.  I want to be true to her.  I want to live for her.  I’m not half so bad as you think I am.  I have often tried to be constant, and now I mean to be.  This ceaseless desire of change is very stupid, and it leads to nothing.  I’m sick of change, and would think of none but her.  You have no idea how I have altered since I have seen her.  I used to desire all women.  I wrote a ballade the other day on the women of two centuries hence.  Is it not shocking to think that we shall lie mouldering in our graves while women are dancing and kissing?  They will not even know that I lived and was loved.  It will not occur to them to say as they undress of an evening, ‘Were he alive to-day we might love him.’”

   The ballade of Don Juan dead

  My days for singing and loving are over,
    And stark I lie in my narrow bed,
  I care not at all if roses cover,
    Or if above me the snow is spread;
    I am weary of dreaming of my sweet dead,
  All gone like me unto common clay. 
  Life’s bowers are full of love’s fair fray,
    Of piercing kisses and subtle snares;
  So gallants are conquered, ah, well away!—­
    My love was stronger and fiercer than theirs.

  O happy moths that now flit and hover
    From the blossom of white to the blossom of red,
  Take heed, for I was a lordly lover
    Till the little day of my life had sped;
    As straight as a pine-tree, a golden head,
  And eyes as blue as an austral bay. 
  Ladies, when loosing your evening array,
    Reflect, had you lived in my years, my prayers
  Might have won you from weakly lovers away—­
    My love was stronger and fiercer than theirs.

  Through the song of the thrush and the pipe of the plover
    Sweet voices come down through the binding lead;
  O queens that every age must discover
    For men, that man’s delight may be fed;
    Oh, sister queens to the queens I wed. 
  For the space of a year, a month, a day,
  No thirst but mine could your thirst allay;
    And oh, for an hour of life, my dears,
  To kiss you, to laugh at your lovers’ dismay—­
    My love was stronger and fiercer than theirs.

    Envoi
  Prince was I ever of festival gay,
  And time never silvered my locks with gray;
    The love of your lovers is as hope that despairs,
  So think of me sometimes, dear ladies, I pray—­
    My love was stronger and fiercer than theirs.

“It is like all your poetry—­merely meretricious glitter; there is no heart in it.  That a man should like to have a nice mistress, a girl he is really fond of, is simple enough, but lamentation over the limbo of unborn loveliness is, to my mind, sheer nonsense.”

Mike laughed.

“Of course it is silly, but I cannot alter it; it is the sex and not any individual woman that attracts me.  I enter a ball-room and I see one, one whom I have never seen before, and I say, ’It is she whom I have sought, I can love her.’  I am always disappointed, but hope is born again in every fresh face.  Women are so common when they have loved you.”