conceited and commonplace jackass, totally undeserving of her); Agnes
Wicklow (a passion quickly cured when she took Dora's pitiful leavings),
and poor ill-fated Marie Antoinette? You can name dozens if you have
been brought up in good literary society.

* * * * *

These love affairs may be owned freely, as being perfectly honorable,
even if hopeless. And, of course, there have been gallantries--mere
affaires du jour--such as every man occasionally engages in. Sometimes
they seemed serious, but only for a moment. There was Beatrix Esmond,
for whom I could certainly have challenged His Grace of Hamilton, had
not Lord Mohun done the work for me. Wandering down the street in London
one night, in a moment of weak admiration for her unrivalled nerve
and aplomb, I was hesitating--whether to call on Mrs. Rawdon Crawley,
knowing that her thick-headed husband was in hoc for debt--when the door
of her house crashed open and that old scoundrel, Lord Steyne, came
wildly down the steps, his livid face blood-streaked, his topcoat on
his arm and a dreadful look in his eye. The world knows the rest as I
learned it half an hour later at the greengrocer's, where the Crawleys
owed an inexcusably large bill. Then the Duchess de Langeais--but all
this is really private.

After all, a man never truly loves but once. And somewhere in Scotland
there is a mound above the gentle, tender and heroic Helen Mar, where
lies buried the first love of my soul. That mound, O lovely and loyal
Helen, was watered by the first blinding and unselfish tears that
ever sprang from my eyes. You were my first love; others may come and
inevitably they go, but you are still here, under the pencil pocket of
my waistcoat.