nglish
language is Browning's 'Andrea del Sarto.'"

"Isn't it strange to see the kind of men who love clever women like you?
You never could have brought yourself to marry any of them, expecting to
find them congenial. They would have admired you in dumb silence, until
they grew tired of feeling your superiority; after that--what?"

"The deluge, I suppose. Ruth, I don't see how a woman with any
self-respect can marry until she meets her master. That is high treason,
isn't it? But it is one of those sentient bits of truth which we never
mention in society. The man I marry must have a stronger will and a
greater brain than I have, or I should rule him. I'll never marry until I
find a man who knows more than I do. Yet, as to these other men who have
loved me--you know what a tender place a woman has in her heart for the
men who have wanted to marry her. My intellect repudiated, but my heart
cherishes them still. Odd things, hearts. Sometimes I wish we didn't have
any when they ache so. I feel like disagreeing with all the poets to-day,
because they will not say what I believe. Do you remember this, from
Beaumont and Fletcher,

"'Of all the paths that lead to woman's love
Pity's the straightest'?

"Men are fond of saying that, I notice, but I don't think we women bear
out the truth. I couldn't love a man I pitied. I could love one I was
proud of, or afraid of, but one I pitied? Never. It is more true to say
it of men. I believe plenty of girls obtain husbands by virtue of their
weakness, their loneliness, their helplessness, their--anything which
makes a man pity them. Pleasant thought, isn't it, for a woman who loves
her own sex and wishes it held its head up better! You may say that it is
this sort who receive more of the attentions that women love, chivalry
and tenderness and devotion. But if all or any of these were inspired by
pity, I'd rather not have them. I would rather a man would be rough and
brusque with me, if he loved me heroically, than to see him fling his coat
in the mud for me to step on, because he pitied my weakness. Do you know,
Ruth, I think men are a good deal more human than women. You can work them
out by algebra (for they never have more than one unknown quantity, and in
the woman problem there would be more _x_'s than anything else), and you
can go by rules and get the answer. But nothing ever calculated or evolved
can get the final answer to one woman--though they do say she is fond of