“Well,” he looked her over with great care, “aren’t you?”
“You treat me like a human being, not like a woman.”
“What’s the difference?”
“I’m grateful because you don’t seem to make any difference. I like to talk to men—some of them; they do so many interesting things. But all that I ever get is a lot of—fluttering. They won’t talk to me as you do. They twitter and fly away.”
“Birds of passage, eh?”
“Worse,” she pondered, as if out of deep experience; “vultures.”
“Exactly,” he dropped the bantering tone; “I understand precisely what you mean. You’re right; I’m not that sort. Do you know, I have a suspicion that I am sexless. I always treat women as if they were men.... But they won’t have it that way,” he shook his head ruefully, “even the old ones. I’m tremendously interested in many women, but sooner or later they misunderstand my interest. Sooner or later they shame me to the core. Are my ears burning?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. The very remembrance is awful. Sooner or later they begin ... making eyes at me, or they write me outrageous confessions and then—I decamp! Of course I understand the law of the thing, and if I could reciprocate I suppose it would be all right and natural. Lord! I am interested only in their minds! You know Shakespeare advocated the ‘marriage of true minds’; but I haven’t found a woman yet who took to it for long.... I can’t afford to marry.... I won’t let the thought get in my mind. I have closed my life to the things that tie me. ‘I celebrate myself’ with good old Walt and decline to attach myself to anything. Detachment—that’s the only means of happiness. One must be an observer, never a participant. That’s the artist’s point of view. With wife and children would come a sort of pleasant, altruistic slavery. Thank the Lord ‘Jawn’ Galloway is a gentleman—I never need fear that some day he will fall in love with me.”
At this point the break in the journey had begun. For some unaccountable reason this speech had inflamed Geraldine with anger. It was seemingly so pointed, so carefully aimed at her. It was, as she took it, a notice in advance not to trespass; indeed a hint that inevitably she would trespass. Make eyes at him? Write him confessions? Egoist? Egotist, rather! The colossal vanity of the man! Well, she would show him. She would prove an exception to his experience. And so she fumed, but kept her outward calm.