"It would be nice to feel that a man liked you well enough to perform unnecessary and absurd actions for your sake," added Alice wistfully.
Edgar looked at her, but he said nothing; he only understood.
"It would not please me if men did absurd things for my sake," persisted Joanna. "It would only please me if they did good and noble things to win my regard."
"Joanna is quite right," agreed Joanna's brother approvingly. "Vain women do men a lot of harm."
"Even if they like them?" suggested Alice.
"Of course; the more the men like them, the more harm they do. But the worst of women is," continued Paul, "that they are always wanting to see what will happen if they do certain things. They make a man angry just to see what he looks like when he is angry; and they make a man miserable just to see what he looks like when he is miserable; and they never realize how much gratuitous suffering all this entails upon the man."
"But they haven't the slightest idea how much it hurts," said Edgar. "They know that it is all a sort of histrionic performance or scientific experiment, and they expect the man to treat the matter from the same intellectual standpoint. While as for him, poor beggar! he only knows that he is being broken on the wheel, and he cannot for the life of him see the object of it, as you say."
Now Alice was a good girl as well as a pretty girl, and amiable and unselfish into the bargain; but she was not the reigning beauty of Chayford for nothing, and she now and again wanted—like other queens—to try on her regalia. So she said, in her sweet plaintive voice, "I should so like some of those water-lilies from the far side of the pool."
The said lilies grew under a steep and slippery bank which was the only approach to them, there being no boat on Chayford Pool at this particular time. Both men looked across the pool, and Paul shook his head.
"I'm afraid you can't have them," he said, "till there is a boat on the water. The bank is not really safe after the heavy rains we have had lately."