He was looking off into space from the depths of the easy chair, a mocking smile on his classical, impassive face.
"What puzzles me," she went on, "is why you interest yourself in as vain and shallow and vacillating a woman as I am. You don't care for my looks—and that's all there is to me."
"Don't pause to be contradicted," said he.
She was in a fine humor now. "You might at least have said I was up to the female average, for I am. What have they got to offer a man but their looks? Do you know why I despise men?"
"Do you?"
"I do. And it's because they put up with women as much as they do—spend so much money on them, listen to their chatter, admire their ridiculous clothes. Oh, I understand why. I've learned that. And I can imagine myself putting up with anything in some one man I happened to fancy strongly. But men are foolish about the whole sex—or all of them that have a shadow of a claim to good looks."
"Yes, the men make fools of themselves," admitted he. "But I notice that the men manage somehow to make the careers, and hold on to the money and the power, while the women have to wheedle and fawn and submit in order to get what they want from the men. There's nothing to be said for your sex. It's been hopelessly corrupted by mine. For all the talk about the influence of woman, what impression has your sex made upon mine? And your sex—it has been made by mine into exactly what we wished it to be. Take my advice, get out of your sex. Abandon it, and make a career."
After a while she recalled with a start the events of less than an hour ago—events that ought to have seemed wildly exciting, arousing the deepest and strongest emotions. Yet they had made no impression upon her. Absolutely none. She had no horror in the thought that she had been the victim of a bigamist; she had no elation over her release into freedom and safety. She wondered whether this arose from utter frivolousness or from indifference to the trifles of conventional joys, sorrows, agitations, excitements which are the whole life of most people—that indifference which is the cause of the general opinion that men and women who make careers are usually hardened in the process.
As she lay awake that night—she had got a very bad habit of lying awake hour after hour—she suddenly came to a decision. But she did not tell Keith for several days. She did it in this way:
"Don't you think I'm looking better?" she asked.