out, are much more cautious about
embracing the conventional hocus-pocus of the situation. They never
acknowledge that they have fallen in love, as the phrase is, until the
man has formally avowed the delusion, and so cut off his retreat; to
do otherwise would be to bring down upon their heads the mocking and
contumely of all their sisters. With them, falling in love thus appears
in the light of an afterthought, or, perhaps more accurately, in the
light of a contagion. The theory, it would seem, is that the love of
the man, laboriously avowed, has inspired it instantly, and by some
unintelligible magic; that it was non-existent until the heat of his own
flames set it off. This theory, it must be acknowledged, has a certain
element of fact in it. A woman seldom allows herself to be swayed by
emotion while the principal business is yet afoot and its issue still
in doubt; to do so would be to expose a degree of imbecility that
is confined only to the half-wits of the sex. But once the man is
definitely committed, she frequently unbends a bit, if only as a relief
from the strain of a fixed purpose, and so, throwing off her customary
inhibitions, she, indulges in the luxury of a more or less forced and
mawkish sentiment. It is, however, almost unheard of for her to permit
herself this relaxation before the sentimental intoxication of the man
is assured. To do otherwise--that is, to confess, even post facto, to an
anterior descent,--would expose her, as I have said, to the scorn of all
other women. Such a confession would be an admission that emotion had
got the better of her at a critical intellectual moment, and in the eyes
of women, as in the eyes of the small minority of genuinely intelligent
men, no treason to the higher cerebral centres could be more
disgraceful.

8. The Male Beauty

This disdain of sentimental weakness, even in those higher reaches where
it is mellowed by aesthetic sensibility, is well revealed by the fact
that women are seldom bemused by mere beauty in men. Save on the stage,
the handsome fellow has no appreciable advantage in amour over his
more Gothic brother. In real life, indeed, he is viewed with the utmost
suspicion by all women save the most stupid. In him the vanity native to
his sex is seen to mount to a degree that is positively intolerable. It
not only irritates by its very nature; it also throws about him a
sort of unnatural armour, and so makes him resistant to the ordinary
app