From John O’Hara’s Appointment In Samarra:
… Girls fitted easily into their own and your own picture of someone dying of unrequited love. If they slipped out before you were ready, that was all right too; their slipping out frequently was the necessary reminder that an affair had run its course. It was also the necessary reminder that the realist in a woman, the good appraiser, makes her want to take a loss and get out before she is — for the purposes of the analogy — ruined.
Odilonvert 