human
Calembours, I would have been a better man now but for one grave mistake which I made early in life. I loved a woman passionately and purely; she was my first conception of love, and would have perfected in me a noble manhood had she been worthy. She broke the trust--vilely cheated me, and fled with an officer in the artillery, a man whom all pure women would have shrunk from; and she was lost, as she might have foreseen. Since then, to perdition to the sex, say I, and their cant of feminine purity, for of all crafty, insatiable, double-faced hypocrites I have found woman to be the worst.