roaches. For this reason, the matrimonial enterprises of the more
reflective and analytical sort of women are almost always directed to
men whose lack of pulchritude makes them easier to bring down, and,
what is more important still, easier to hold down. The weight of opinion
among women is decidedly against the woman who falls in love with an
Apollo. She is regarded, at best, as flighty creature, and at worst,
as one pushing bad taste to the verge of indecency. Such weaknesses are
resigned to women approaching senility, and to the more ignoble variety
of women labourers. A shop girl, perhaps, may plausibly fall in love
with a moving-picture actor, and a half-idiotic old widow may succumb
to a youth with shoulders like the Parthenon, but no woman of poise and
self-respect, even supposing her to be transiently flustered by a lovely
buck, would yield to that madness for an instant, or confess it to her
dearest friend. Women know how little such purely superficial values are
worth. The voice of their order, the first taboo of their freemasonry,
is firmly against making a sentimental debauch of the serious business
of marriage.

This disdain of the pretty fellow is often accounted for by amateur
psychologists on the ground that women are anesthetic to beauty--that
they lack the quick and delicate responsiveness of man. Nothing could
be more absurd. Women, in point of fact, commonly have a far keener
aesthetic sense than men. Beauty is more important to them; they
give more thought to it; they crave more of it in their immediate
surroundings. The average man, at least in England and America, takes
a sort of bovine pride in his anaesthesia to the arts; he can think of
them only as sources of tawdry and somewhat discreditable amusement; one
seldom hears of him showing half the enthusiasm for any beautiful thing
that his wife displays in the presence, of a fine fabric, an effective
colour, or a graceful form, say in millinery. The truth is that women
are resistant to so-called beauty in men for the simple and sufficient
reason that such beauty is chiefly imaginary. A truly beautiful man,
indeed, is as rare as a truly beautiful piece of jewelry. What men
mistake for beauty in themselves is usually nothing save a certain
hollow gaudiness, a revolting flashiness, the superficial splendour of a
prancing animal. The most lovely moving picture actor, considered in the
light of genuine aesthetic values, is no more than a piece of vul