Peter Cheyney

I've seen a lot of women in my life.All sorts and conditions of women in all sorts of places.But I'd never seen any one like this one. There was some odd, indefinable quality about her, something , that got you like a punch between the eyes, and it wasn't only that she was absolutely lovely, that everything about her matched her loveliness. There was something else. An essentially womanly, very defenite, Allure that was all the stronger because she was quite unconscious of it.

Women could be the devil, he thought.They deflected you.You were going to do something or go somewhere and some woman turned up and so you didn't do what you were going to do or where you intended to go. They were soft and attractive and alluring. They were perfumed, charming and seductive. They were hell!

A suggestion of her perfume came to his nostrils!

She was a mixture of decency, violent desires, utter recklesness and a certain ability to take life as it came without making a song and dance about it.

Any man who's fond of a woman and realises that she's engaged to somebody else always thinks she's making a fool of herself.