[XIV]
Not nearly enough admiration has been granted by the male human to the most remarkable quality possessed by the human female—her ability to recuperate. Man worships the heroic virtues in man. But in woman he worships the intangible thing called charm, the fleeting thing called beauty. Man hates to concede that woman is his superior in anything, wherefore even that well-known ability of hers to endure suffering he brushes aside as inconsequential, giving credit to Mother Nature. Possibly Mother Nature does deserve the credit. Still, man has no quality that he has bestowed upon himself. Yet that does not prevent him from being proud of the physique that he inherited from his grandfather, the brain that he inherited from his father, or the wit that descended to him from some other ancestor.
So may women justly be proud of their recuperative powers. For these powers are more than physical. Thousands of years of child-bearing, of undergoing an agony that in each successive generation, because of corsets, because of silly notions of living, of too much work or too little work, has become more poignant, have had their effect upon the female character.
If the baby dies, father is prostrated. It is mother who attends to all the needful details, although her own sense of loss, of unbearable grief, is greater, perhaps, than her husband's. If father loses his job, he mopes in despair; it is mother who encourages him, who wears a smiling face, even though the problem of existence seems more unsolvable to her than to him.
It does not do to attribute this quality to women's histrionic ability. For the histrionism is due to the quality, not the obverse. It was not acting that made Clancy smile coquettishly up into Randall's lowering visage as he swept her away from Vandervent. It was courage—the sheerest sort of courage.
In the moment that Randall had come to claim her, her feet had suddenly become leaden, her eyes had been shifting, frightened. Yet they had not taken half a dozen steps before she was again the laughing heroine of the party. For that she had been! Even a novice such as Clancy Deane knew that more than courtesy to a hostess' protégée was behind the attentions of Judge Walbrough. And she was versed enough in masculine admiration to realize that Vandervent's interest had been genuinely roused. Flattery, success had made her eyes brilliant, her lips and cheeks redder, her step lighter. Danger threatened her, but cringing would not make the danger any less real. Therefore, why cringe? This, though she did not express it, even to herself, inspired her gayety.
The fact that Randall's brows were gathered together in a frown made her excitement—her pleasurable excitement—greater. Knowing that he had conceived a quick jealousy for Vandervent, she could not forbear asking, after the immemorial fashion of women who know what is the matter,
"What's the matter?"
And Randall, like a million or so youths before him, who have known that the questioner was well aware of the answer, said,