r. But just at first glance, so colorless or
conventionally colored is the usual human being, the average
woman--indeed every woman but she who is exceptional--creates upon man
the mere impression of pleasant or unpleasant petticoats. In the
exceptional woman something obtrudes. She has astonishing hair, or
extraordinary eyes, or a mouth that seems to draw a man like a magnet;
or it is the allure of a peculiar smile or of a figure whose
sinuosities as she moves seem to cause a corresponding wave-disturbance
in masculine nerves. Further, the possession of one of these signal
charms usually causes all her charms to have more than ordinary
potency. The sight of the man is so bewitched by the one potent charm
that he sees the whole woman under a spell.

Mildred Gower, of the medium height and of a slender and well-formed
figure, had a face of the kind that is called lovely; and her smile,
sweet, dreamy, revealing white and even teeth, gave her loveliness
delicate animation. She had an abundance of hair, neither light nor
dark; she had a fine clear skin. Her eyes, gray and rather serious and
well set under long straight brows, gave her a look of honesty and
intelligence. But the charm that won men, her charm of charms, was her
mouth--mobile, slightly pouted, not too narrow, of a wonderful, vividly
healthy and vital red. She had beauty, she had intelligence. But it
was impossible for a man to think of either, once his glance had been
caught by those expressive, inviting lips of hers, so young, so fresh,
with their ever-changing, ever-fascinating line expressing in a
thousand ways the passion and poetry of the kiss.

Of all the men who had admired her and had edged away because they
feared she would bewitch them into forgetting what the world calls
"good common sense"--of all those men only one had suspected the real
reason for her physical power over men. All but Stanley Baird had
thought themselves attracted because she was so pretty or so stylish or
so clever and amusing to talk with. Baird had lived intelligently
enough to learn that feminine charm is never general, is always
specific. He knew it was Mildred Gower's lips that haunted, that
frightened ambitious men away, that sent men who knew they hadn't a
ghost of a chance with her discontentedly back to the second-choice
women who alone were available for them. Fortunately for Mildred,
Stanley Baird, too wise to flatter a woman discriminatingly, did not
te