"Then, I think men are dull. They don't hear what you say quickly enough. They don't see what it means half the time. And they aren't noticing what's going on around them. They're wrapped in a fog of newspaper print and tobacco. They're slow. Slow!
"I think men are so ugly, too. Look at them in omnibuses and trains. Look at them anywhere! Are they attractive? Not to me. I don't like their nubbly knuckles and their huge feet (not that I need talk in these land boots, but still)—I can't bear those great wrists they have. I hate their horrid skins where they shave—all nutmeg-graters! How any girl wants to be kissed by them I don't know. I don't suppose she does really; it's just the Idea. Bristly moustaches, too. Awful!
"They do such hideous things, men. What can be more revolting than the sight of one of them knocking out a dirty, smelly black pipe? Or wolfing down a plateful of half-raw steak? Or mopping up—as they call it—a fat pint of beer out of a pewter pot? I could not love one after seeing him do those things!" declared Elizabeth.
"Yet women do, my dear," I reminded her. "They like a man to be even rather rough-hewn and coarse-fibred, so that he is unlike them. They don't mind his smelling of tobacco, and wearing scratchy tweeds, and tanks on his feet. They like him rugged. I—I speak for myself and for the majority of girls, I think. They like him 'manly.'"
"Heavens!" ejaculated Elizabeth, with equal fervour and truth in her voice. "How I do loathe what they call 'a manly man'! All lumps, and a bull's voice, and irregular features!"
"But," I suggested mildly, "you wouldn't want a man to look like the picture off a chocolate-box lid?"
"I should adore it," declared this exception in girls. "When I was a little girl, once, I was given a box of sweets with a picture on the lid called 'The Falconer.' He wore a golden-brown hunting-dress and he had a hawk on his shoulder, and golden hair and soft eyes, and, oh! such a pretty face! I thought at the time, 'If only I could ever see a young man looking like that Falconer!' And now I have. Colonel Fielding is exactly like that picture. Oh, Joan, I think he's the most beautiful thing I've seen."
How true it is that when a really reserved person breaks down the barriers it will babble out ten times more than some one who is more expansive in every-day life!
I, for instance, should never have dreamt of calling any young man "the most beautiful thing I'd seen." Not Harry, handsome as he was. Not Captain Holiday, though he was good-looking enough for any girl to rave over; manly good looks, too. Very different from the namby-pamby prettiness of Elizabeth's young Colonel! Personally, I considered that it would take more than his D.S.O. and the devotion of his men to their officer to make one forget that he could dress up and look exactly like a girl!
Yet here was the boyish, resolute, no-nonsense-about-her Elizabeth glorying in the fact!