Page:Othmar, by Ouida.djvu/23

 long while indeed, and at the first glance of pity revives in full vigour.'

'Why, then, do women usually commit the error of surfeiting him? For I agree with you that a surfeit is fatal.'

'Because most women cannot be brought to understand that too much of themselves may bring about a wayward wish to have none of them. They call this natural and inevitable reaction ingratitude and inconstancy, but it is nothing of the kind; it is only human nature.'

'Male human nature. The wish for pastures new, characteristic of cattle, sheep and man.'

La femme est si souvent trompée parce qu'elle prend le désir pour l'amour." Someone wrote that; I forget who did, but it is entirely true. Une bouffée de désir, an hour's caprice, a swift flaming of mere animal passion which flares up and dies down like any shooting star, seems to a woman to be the ideal love of romance and of tragedy. She dreams of Othello, of Anthony, of Stradella, and all the while it is Sir Harry Wildair, or Joseph Surface, or at the best of things Almaviva. She