il, wasn't I?"
"Well, you can call it that."
He is ready to examine the window locks, but he turns and surveys her,
and he is honestly puzzled.
"What I can't make out," he says, "is how you can fall all over yourself
to those people, when you know you detest them. Thank heavens, I'm no
hypocrite."
Then he locks the windows and stalks up-stairs, and the hypocrite of
the family smiles a little to herself. Because she knows that without
her there would be no society and no neighborhood calls, and that
honesty can be a vice, and hypocrisy a virtue.
I know a vestryman of a church who sometimes plays bridge on Saturday
nights for money. What he loses doesn't matter, but what he wins his
wife is supposed to put on the plate the next morning. One Saturday
night he gave her a large bill, and the next morning she placed a neatly
folded green-back on the collection plate as he held it out to her. He
stood in the aisle and eyed the bill with suspicion. Then he
deliberately unfolded it, and held out the plate to her again.
"Come over, Mazie," he said.
And Mazie came over with the balance.
You know what a woman would have done. She would have marked the bill
with her eye, and later on while waiting at the rear for the chair
offertory to end, she would have investigated. Then on the way home she
would have said:
"I had a good notion to stand right there, Charlie Smith, and show you
up. I wish I had." But the point is that she wouldn't have.
There is no moral whatever to this brief tale.
But perhaps it is in love that men and women differ most vitally. Now
Nature, being extremely wise, gives the man in love the wisdom of the
serpent and the wile of the dove (which is a most alluring bird in its
love-making). A man in love brings to it all his intelligence. And men
like being in love.
Being in love is not so happy for a woman. She becomes emotional and
difficult, is either on the heights or in the depths. And the reason for
this is simple; love is a complex to a woman. She has to contend with
natural and acquired inhibitions. She both desires love and fears it.
The primitive woman ran away from her lover, but like Lot's wife, she
looked back. I am inclined to think, however, that primitive woman
looked back rather harder than she ran. Be that as it may, women to-day
both desire love and fear it.
If men fear it, they successfully hide their cowardice.
It is in their methods of making love that men cease
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