"I call that a new form of persecutional mania."
"He was in dead earnest, Rob. He called himself a martyr to love, fancy that!"
"Well, he seemed to be a remarkably willing martyr tonight. He buzzed like a huge wasp from one pair of lips to another. When he got to Mazie, who unfolds her petals so alluringly, he became quite intoxicated."
"Which means that Mazie acted in a perfectly shameless way, as usual."
"Whose mind is a prison now?"
"I don't know what you mean," said Cornelia acridly. "Please don't assume that, because I no longer believe in marriage, I've turned my back on decency and good manners."
"This is breaking a butterfly on a wheel, Cornelia. The fact is, Mazie doesn't have to act to produce the peculiar behavior in men which I described. You know that quite well. She is what Joseph Conrad calls 'one of the women of all time.' I'd call her a throw-back with the emotions and appetites of a cave woman and the thoughts and looks of a Ziegfield chorus girl. It's not by acting shamelessly, or by acting at all, but by just passively being herself that she sets a man's blood boiling."
"A man's blood boils so easily—like a kettle on a mountain!"
"Be fair, Cornelia. Some men's blood does, yes. Men on Mazie's own level. Burley's one of them."
"Well," said Cornelia, waiving the point, "what did Hutchins do, or rather undo?"