"Perfectly true, but you're neither a scientist nor a doctor. That book is as bad for you as the advertisement of a quack medicine is for some weak-minded people. You find all your own symptoms, and, like them, are glad when you do. Drop such reading, Colonel Graeme; take up something healthy."
"Like that thing you've got there, I suppose, 'The Cow in the Morning,' isn't it? It sounds as if it might have been written by one of Lombroso's friends."
"Don't be cheap, please. It's 'The Heifer of the Dawn,' and, well, you may think it silly, but I don't. Listen to this, and judge for yourself, though in the interests of women I consider this particular paragraph ought to be suppressed." She took up the book and began to read.
"'She that is to retain her lover's love for ever must possess, first, a body without a flaw, or his senses will stray from her to other bodies, for it is their nature to seek their proper object; secondly, intelligence, or his esteem will depart elsewhere; and thirdly, goodness, or his soul will abandon her in search of that without which it cannot do, and without which the other two component parts are worthless except for a time. And as it is for the woman so it is for the man, with this difference, that their bodies and their intelligence and their souls are totally unlike.'"
"And, if she has all that, he's bound to be faithful, I suppose?"
"In theory yes, but I'm afraid not practically. You see, the speaker, being a woman, looks at it from a woman's point of view, which is not that of a man, their intelligence being, as she says, totally unlike. She thinks that, if she is perfectly beautiful, her husband's thoughts will never stray to one less so. But that can't be right, for in many cases men have left beautiful wives for ugly mistresses. A woman can't or won't see that—that—how shall I put it nicely?"
"That in the sexual instinct lies her whole attraction. Pah!"
"Thank you, though that's not nicely put.... And once that dies, her beauty ceases to exist for him. She might be a picture on the wall as far as he's concerned: the beauty is still there, and others see it, but the owner has seen it too often and got tired."
"And the intellect part?"
"No good at all to keep him. A man may like talking to a so-called clever woman—which, by the way, only means one quick to utilise men's brains, for no woman can originate, only receive—but that doesn't prevent him from kissing a pretty fool five minutes afterwards."