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"Well then?"

"Well, what shall I say? I have broken with her."

Forsaken! She too had then come to swell the list, after Martha, Gina, and myself!

"That's horrible. She was so very much in love with you."

"Whereas I, alas! have a preference for women who care for nothing very much."

"Yet I know you have been moody of late."

"And you are right: yes, I have."

"Well, what was it that troubled your Olympian calm? The parting scene—tears—upbraiding?"

"Pas le moins du monte. She went away without uttering a word."

"Then what was it?"

"That I have simply lost my belief in the last dogma left to me from childhood. Everybody complains that women are too devoid of heart and brains and soul; and I now find that it is in vain I have sought for a woman bereft of those superfluous appendages."

"But Helen, as I understood, answered your ideal of a woman to perfection?"

"I fondly thought she did. Oh, you cannot imagine what I would give to meet a woman