lated manly characteristics, but it did not give
you all the manly characteristics in one being at once, which
constituted the all-round man of her dreams.

Whether it was that man had specialised too much of recent years, or
what the reason might be, Cleopatra could not tell. But whenever she
passed the men of her acquaintance in review, she always arrived at the
same conclusion, that each represented only a fragment of what the whole
man of her ideal was, and doubtless of what man himself had once been.
It was as if she had been deposited among the ruins of a once beautiful
cathedral. Fine pieces of screen architecture, exquisite portions of the
capitals, delightful gargoyles, lay in profusion all around: but the
whole building could be reconstructed in all its majesty, only by an
effort of the imagination. This effort of the imagination she had made
as a girl of seventeen.

To-day it seemed to her, you might choose the cleanly-bred, healthy,
upright, jaunty athlete, and sigh in vain for a companion who could
either sob or rejoice with you over the glory of a sonnet, a picture, or
a statue; or else you might choose the slightly effete and partly
neurotic poet or artist, and languish unconsoled, away from the joys of
the fine, clean, stubbornly healthy body. The kind of fire that led to
elopements, to wild and clandestine love-making, could now, with too few
exceptions, be found only among ne'er-do-wells, foreign adventurers,
cut-throats or knaves; while the stability that promised security for
the future and for the family, seemed generally to present itself with a
sort of tiresome starchiness of body and jejuneness of mind, that
thought it childish to abandon itself to any emotion.

She was deep enough, primitively female enough to demand and expect a
certain savour of wickedness in him who wooed her. But she was more
accustomed to perceive the outward signs of this coveted quality in the
waiters at the Carlton, or the Savoy, and among dust-men, coal-heavers
and butcher-boys, than in the men of her mother's circle.

Had man been tamed out of all recognition? Or was her instinct wrong,
and was it perverse to sigh for fire, wickedness, stability,
cultivation, and healthy athleticism--all in the same man? She had read
of Alcibiades, of men who were not fragmentary. Could such a man be born
nowadays, and if born could he survive? Certainly the men she had
refused had not been of this stamp.

It was miserably disappo