"I've small patience with women, I will admit. They amount to little, and they're sinking to less. Girls used to dream of the man they'd marry. Now it's not the man at all, but the establishment. Their romance is of furniture and carriages and servants and clothes. A man, any man, to support them in luxury."
"I've noticed that," admitted Alois.
"It's bad enough to look on marriage as a career," continued Narcisse. "But, pass that over. What do the women do to fit themselves for it? A man learns his business—usually in a half-hearted sort of way, but still he tries to learn a little something about it. A woman affects to despise hers—and does shirk it. She knows nothing about cooking, nothing about buying, nothing about values or quantities or economy or health or babies or— She rarely knows how to put on the clothes she gets; you'll admit that most women show plainly they haven't a notion what clothes they ought to wear. Women don't even know enough to get together respectably clever traps to catch the men with. The men fall in; they aren't drawn in."
"Yet," said Alois, ironic and irritated, "the world staggers on."
"Staggers," retorted Narcisse. "And the prosperous classes—we're talking about them—don't even stagger on. They stop and slide back—what can be expected of the husbands of such wives, the sons and daughters of such mothers?"
Narcisse was so intensely in earnest that her brother laughed outright. "There, there, Cissy," said he, "don't be alarmed—I'm not even engaged yet."
Narcisse made no reply. She knew the weak side of her brother's character, knew its melancholy possibilities of development; and she had guessed what was passing in his mind as he and Amy were trying each to please the other.
"You yourself would be the better—the happier, certainly—for falling in love," pursued Alois.
"Indeed I should," she assented with sincerity. "But the man who comes for me—or whom I set my snares for—must have something more than a pretty face or a few sex-tricks that ought not to fool a girl just out of the nursery."
No arrow penetrates a man's self-esteem more deeply than an insinuation that he is easy game for women. But Alois was no match for his sister at that kind of warfare. He hid his irritation, and said good-humoredly, "When you fall in love, my dear, it'll be just like the rest of us—with your heart, not with your head."