Then I want you to understand the effect of Love on them both. She perceives in him at once the Soul sleeping there and it produces in her a strong emotion. She suddenly sees this young Englishman, who comes as an echo of something straight and true in manhood which, in outward appearance at all events, she has met in her youth in the person of his Uncle Hubert. You must see her at Lucerne, obsessed with the knowledge of her horrible life with her brutal, vicious husband, to whom she had been sacrificed for political reasons when almost a child. A great splendid nature, full of the passionate realisation of primitive instincts, immensely cultivated, polished, blase. Thus, as you read, I want you to think of her as such a study. If I were making the study of a Tiger, I would not give it the attributes of a spaniel, because the public, and I myself, might prefer a spaniel! I would still seek to portray accurately every minute instinct of that Tiger, to make a living picture.

(As I wrote it, I suppose it could be believed I know something about that!) For me “the Lady” was a deep study, the analysis of a strange Slav nature, who, from circumstances and education and her general view of life, was beyond the ordinary laws of morality. I feel now, when my “Three Weeks” is to be launched in a new land, where I have many sympathetic friends, that, owing to the misunderstanding and misrepresentation it received from nearly the entire press and a section of the public in England, I would like to state my view of its meaning.

The Reason Why by Elinor Glyn