"Don't say it, my child. He's not the man for you at all. I know best. I'm thinking of your happiness." Alice shrugged a skeptical comment.
Her mother went on: "Do you remember how you had all the chocolate creams you wanted—once? You couldn't look at one for a year after. Well, living on love alone is like trying to live on chocolate creams alone. And he couldn't afford even to keep you in chocolate creams."
Alice made no answer. She sat studying her own thoughts.
Forbes felt a sudden kinship with Alice's absent lover and beloved, this Stowe Webb, whose crime was lack of money. He imagined that Persis' mother had told her the same cold things that Alice was hearing now. He began to believe that many daughters must hear such financial talk against love from their mothers. He had heard so many married women scoff at love as a delusion. He wondered if, after all, it were not really man, rather than woman, who is the romantic animal.
"Men," he pondered, "write the great poems and the great romances, paint the great pictures, fight the great fights against nature and ignorance and oppression and poverty. They compose the great music, supply the demand for love songs and love stories, and build the places to love in. Then they lay their wealth and ambition and achievement at the feet of little women, and each little woman selects from those that gather at her feet the one that she thinks will dress her best and house her best and give her the best time."
He had read much in books, written chiefly by gallant gentlemen whose flattery was greater than their accuracy, that woman was a slave, a toy, a plaything, a victim of man's cruelty. Now he began to believe that in the vast bulk of instances the reverse was true. The little women set their feet on the men's necks and rode upon their shoulders, and when they were displeased pulled the men's hair, poked fingers into their eyes, or abandoned them entirely.
He felt again what he had felt when he studied Fifth Avenue and its womankind; for every woman's finery some man pays. Woman was the grasping sex, the exacting, yet extravagant sex. The eternal feminine was the eternal calculatrix.
He had wondered what these women paid for what they got from men. He believed now that he had found the answer. They paid with their bodies, their kisses, the encircling of arms, the cooing of tender words. In return for so much money they granted permission to spend yet more.
He studied Persis; how beautiful she was, how soft and gracile, how apt to endearments! Yet she held herself at a price, at a high price, and called it pride, self-protection. What was it but self-exploitation?
Yet what man ever desired an object less because it was beyond his means? Persis was certainly no less adorable to Forbes because he could not buy her. He would have to get along without her. But, having once held her in his arms while she held him in hers, he would never cease to desire her. Like the father of a spendthrift child, he rather felt ashamed of himself for being incompetent to meet her demands, than contemned her for making them.