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I vowed that I would
not be seduced by trumpery conversation about Yokohama or allow my mind
to be distracted by absurd adventures among cats. I would clothe myself
in the armour of eumoiriety, and, with the sword of duty in my hand,
would go forth to battle with the enchantress. 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.


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