ot do it is a failure, and she is Nature's triumph
and entelechy, who does it best. And this every woman knows, by
instinct, and feels, long before she knows it, almost as soon as she
can stand upon her feet: consequently, no artificially elaborated
compliment, no calculated flattery, ever touches her so near, as it
does, when she perceives that her personality _tells_, acts like a
charm, on any given man: a point about which no woman ever blunders,
as a man often so ridiculously does about himself: she invariably
detects, by unerring instinct, when her arrow hits its mark. And this
involuntary homage she finds so irresistibly delectable, going as it
does down to the very depths of her being, and endorsing it, that she
literally _cannot_ deny herself the pleasure of basking in it, making
hay, so to say, while her sun shines, revelling in the consciousness
of her power all the more delicious because she knows only too well
that she must lose it later on, as youth flies: old age, _i.e._ the
loss of her charm, being every woman's ogre, the skeleton in her
cupboard, which she dreads far more than death, just as the only
disease which she shudders to face is the smallpox, for a similar
reason. And so, when she finds her spell working, she lets herself go:
never dreaming what interpretation her victim puts on her behaviour:
and then, all at once, she awakes to discover with what fire she was
ignorantly playing. And then it is, that she recoils, on the verge:
and then it is, that thwarted in the very moment that he deemed
triumph secured, the baffled lover falls into fury and abuse, because
he imagines her to have been all along clearly aware of what she was
about, which is exactly what hardly one woman in a million does. Not
being a man, she does not understand: her end is only his beginning:
his object is possession, still to come: hers is already gained in the
form of the tribute to her charm: she was only playing (every woman is
a child), he was in deadly earnest, and took her purely instinctive
self-congratulation for a promise deliberately made. Suddenly
illuminated, she lets him down abruptly with a bump, all the harder
that she never meant to do it (the _coquette_ does: but she is a
horrible professional, methodising feminine instinct, for prey: a
psychological ghoul, feeding on souls instead of bodies, and deserving
extermination without benefit of clergy). The real crime of woman is
not so much a crime as a defect: sh