e
male gaze into mysterious and sinister recesses. And so the male behind
the gaze flies to arms. He may be taken in the end--indeed, he usually
is--but he is not taken by surprise; he is not taken without a fight. A
brunette has to battle for every inch of her advance. She is confronted
by an endless succession of Dead Man's Hills, each equipped with
telescopes, semaphores, alarm gongs, wireless. The male sees her clearly
through her densest smoke-clouds.... But the blonde captures him under a
flag of truce. He regards her tenderly, kindly, almost pityingly, until
the moment the gyves are upon his wrists.

It is all an optical matter, a question of color. The pastel shades
deceive him; the louder hues send him to his artillery. God help, I say,
the red-haired girl! She goes into action with warning pennants flying.
The dullest, blindest man can see her a mile away; he can catch the
alarming flash of her hair long before he can see the whites, or even
the terrible red-browns, of her eyes. She has a long field to cross,
heavily under defensive fire, before she can get into rifle range. Her
quarry has a chance to throw up redoubts, to dig himself in, to call for
reinforcements, to elude her by ignominious flight. She must win, if she
is to win at all, by an unparalleled combination of craft and
resolution. She must be swift, daring, merciless. Even the brunette of
black and penetrating eye has great advantages over her. No wonder she
never lets go, once her arms are around her antagonist's neck! No
wonder she is, of all women, the hardest to shake off!

All nature works in circles. Causes become effects; effects develop into
causes. The red-haired girl's dire need of courage and cunning has
augmented her store of those qualities by the law of natural selection.
She is, by long odds, the most intelligent and bemusing of women. She
shows cunning, foresight, technique, variety. She always fails a dozen
times before she succeeds; but she brings to the final business the
abominable expertness of a Ludendorff; she has learnt painfully by the
process of trial and error. Red-haired girls are intellectual
stimulants. They know all the tricks. They are so clever that they have
even cast a false glamour of beauty about their worst defect--their
harsh and gaudy hair. They give it euphemistic and deceitful
names--auburn, bronze, Titian. They overcome by their hellish arts that
deep-seated dread of red which is inborn in all of God's