“Nor would I have urged it. The more intimate we became, the more I knew that we were destined to be very great friends, and probably frequent bed-mates, but certainly not a happy bourgeois married couple. For a time I called Magnus Tiresias, because like that wonderful old creature he had been for seven years a woman, and had gained strange wisdom and insight thereby. I thought of him sometimes as Galahad, because of his knightly obsession with the woman we now know as Milady, but I never called him that to his face, because I had done with mocking at his chivalry. I have never understood chivalry, but I have learned to keep my mouth shut about it.”

“It’s a man’s thing,” said I; “and I think we have seen the last of it for a while on this earth. It can’t live in a world of liberated women, and perhaps the liberation of women is worth the price it is certain to cost. But chivalry won’t die easily or unnoticed; banish chivalry from the world and you snap the mainspring of many lives.”

“Good, grey old Ramsay,” said Liesl, reaching over to pat my hand; “always gravely regretting, always looking wistfully backward.”

“You’re both wrong,” said Magnus. “I don’t think chivalry belongs to the past; it’s part of that World View Liesl talks so much about, and that she thinks I possess but don’t understand. What captured my faith and loyalty about Milady had just as much to do with Sir John. He was that rare creature, the Man of One Woman. He loved Milady young and he loved her old and much of her greatness was the creation of his love. To hear people talk and to look at the stuff they read and see in the theatre and the films, you’d think the true man was the man of many women, and the more women, the more masculine the man. Don Juan is the ideal. An unattainable ideal for most men, because of the leisure and money it takes to devote yourself to a life of womanizing—not to speak of the relentless energy, the unappeasable lust, and the sheer woodpecker-like vitality of the sexual organ that such a life demands. Unattainable, yes, but thousands of men have a dab at it, and in their old age they count their handful of successes like rosary beads. But the Man of One Woman is very rare. He needs resources of spirit and psychological virtuosity beyond the common, and he needs luck, too, because the Man of One Woman must find a woman of extraordinary quality. The Man of One Woman was the character Sir John played on the stage, and it was the character he played in life, too.

“I envied him, and I cherished the splendour those two had created. If, by any inconceivable chance, Milady had shown any sexual affection for me, I should have been shocked, and I would have rebuked her. But she didn’t, of course, and I simply warmed myself at their fire, and by God I needed warmth. I once had a hope that I might have found something of the sort for myself, with you, Liesl, but my luck was not to run in that direction. I would have been very happy to be a Man of One Woman, but that wasn’t your way, nor was it mine. I couldn’t forget Milady.”