“Oh come,” I said impatiently—“do not let us theorise! I am happy to-day!—my heart is as light as that of the bird singing in the sky; I am in the very best of humours, and could not say an unkind word to my worst enemy.”
He smiled.
“Is that your humour?” and he took me by the arm—“Then there could be no better opportunity for showing you this pretty little corner of the world;”—and walking on a few yards, he dexterously turned me down a narrow path, leading from the lane, and brought me face to face with a lovely old cottage, almost buried in the green of the young spring verdure, and surrounded by an open fence overgrown with hawthorn and sweet-briar,—“Keep firm hold over your temper Geoffrey,—and maintain the benignant tranquillity of your mind!—here dwells the woman whose name and fame you hate,—Mavis Clare!”
[p 221]
XIX
The blood rushed to my face, and I stopped abruptly.
“Let us go back,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because I do not know Miss Clare and do not want to know her. Literary women are my abhorrence,—they are always more or less unsexed.”
“You are thinking of the ‘New’ women I suppose,—but you flatter them,—they never had any sex to lose. The self-degrading creatures who delineate their fictional heroines as wallowing in unchastity, and who write freely on subjects which men would hesitate to name, are unnatural hybrids of no-sex. Mavis Clare is not one of them,—she is an ‘old-fashioned’ young woman. Mademoiselle Derino, the dancer, is ‘unsexed,’ but you did not object to her on that score,—on the contrary I believe you have shown your appreciation of her talents by spending a considerable amount of cash upon her.”