The vain, negative woman, moreover, is always conscious of an observing public when she is in the company of her admirer, and her triumphant glances at onlookers in such circumstances are a sort of challenge to them to contemplate her in the full intensity of her joy. Part of the gratification of her vanity consists in drawing the envious looks of other women upon her. Hence, too, her perpetual grin, a good deal of which is meant for public notice. The positive woman, on the other hand, is too deeply interested, too seriously concerned, to be able to give a thought to the onlookers. She may even shun the crowd. In her, everything is subordinated to the principal end she has in view.
The vain, negative woman, moreover, because she does not really desire the man who happens to be worshipping her, will brook no breach of manners, of chivalry, of steady worship from him. She is constantly on the alert and vigilant. She keeps him up to the mark, and will quickly rap his knuckles if the incense he is burning at the altar of her self-esteem is the least bit stale, or burns with only a moderate fury, or is swung with any sign of diminished zeal. The passionate woman, on the other hand, will bear anything from the man she really desires, except—absence.
The vain woman’s hatred is roused, not by a refusal to cohabit with her, but by a noticeable lameness in her worshipper’s flattering fluency. She hates those who wound her vanity, not those who cheat her will to Life and its multiplication. She will become homicidal only if she is made to look small or ridiculous, not if she is left sterile. She loathes situations in which she cannot make a display of her bliss.
The positive woman, on the other hand, longs for privacy and secrecy, and forgives nothing less easily than a lack of virile ardour in her male pursuer. He may be silent to the point of dumbness, inarticulate to the point of being unable to apologise when he spills his soup over her dress at table;—all these things she overlooks if he has the first pre-requisite of Life, which is virile ardour rising to impatient and restless importunacy. On the other hand, the worshipper who spills his soup over his negative mistress’s dress in a restaurant or any public assembly, would thenceforward be loathed on that account alone. Because it is mortifying to one’s vanity to be made ridiculous in public.
The negative man of this class is of the cold Don Juan type, who gratifies his vanity more than his sexual appetite by repeated conquests. He too soon tires of his wife and of his home. He does this all the more readily, seeing that his marriage itself has usually been quite an unintended consummation on his part of one of the many flirtations his vanity led him into in early manhood, and that he has been chafing ever since it was finally settled at the thought of the many conquests he might have made before taking the final step.
His nostrils, too, yearn for the hot breath of adulation. He is a tormentor of positive women, because he can so readily hold himself aloof at the last station before the terminus.
If this man becomes unfaithful, it will be because his enormous vanity has overcome his caution. In order to extract the last and most enthralling confession from a young woman’s heart—which will cause him to reach his highest pinnacle of exaltation—one day he will go too far, either in his protestations or in his caresses,[98] and then, if he is dealing with the kind of girl or woman who knows of no facile retreat from such avowals, and who is really in earnest, he will find himself impelled in a direction and to an end which he can truthfully swear he never had in contemplation at the outset.
The fact that the law of England deals too lightly with this kind of dandified scoundrel (for such men almost always dress well) is due not merely to the fact that, generally speaking, it is grotesquely lenient to correspondents as a class, but also to its inability to distinguish between the adultery of the negative man and woman, whose misdemeanour is the outcome of vanity alone, and whose ruin of another’s home is, therefore, wanton and unnecessary, and the adultery which is the outcome of genuine passion, and which, therefore, partakes far more of that quality of human action which is elemental and inevitable.
This man only becomes tragic under a snub. He finds no infinite resource in a deep knowledge of his own value, and is, therefore, incapable of self-consolation when shown the cold-shoulder. Hence the woman who does not fall in with his scheme of mutual worship, incurs his homicidal loathing. She destroys his joie de vivre, his very primum mobile, the source of his will to live. His career is a series of escapes from female fires he has deliberately kindled; but he is always more ready to forgive a burn than the fuel that refuses to flare up under the power of his bellows.
Before concluding section (c) perhaps it would be advisable and also helpful to give a brief analysis of the psychological forces which impel the negative, vain man and woman along their career of vanity-gratification at all costs. For, while to understand them will be in a measure to exonerate them, it will also serve as a means of recognizing their type when we see it.