All said and done, what was she but a bold-faced, strapping woman without an idea in her head save the enslavement of an impressionable boy several years her junior?
It was preposterous that I, Simon de Gex, who had beguiled and fooled an electorate of thirty thousand hard-headed men into choosing me for their representative in Parliament, should not be a match for Lola Brandt.
As for her complicated feminine personality, her intuitiveness, her magnetism, her fascination, all the qualities in fact which my poetical fancy had assigned to her, they had no existence in reality.

She was the most commonplace person I had ever encountered, and I had been but a sentimental lunatic.
In this truly admirable frame of mind I entered her drawing-room.

She threw down the penny novel she was reading, and with a little cry of joy sprang forward to greet me.
"I'm so glad you've come.

I was getting the blind hump!" Did I not say she was commonplace?
I hate this synonym for boredom.
It may be elegant in the mouth of a duchess and pathetic in that of an oyster-wench, but it falls vulgarly from intermediate lips.
"What has given it to you ?" I asked.
"My poor little ouistiti is dead.

It is this abominable climate." I murmured condolences.