Lieutenant Forbes had been so long away from a metropolis, and had lived in such rough countries, that he perhaps mistook the motives of the women of New York, and their standards, underrated their virtues. Vice may go unkempt and shabby, and a saint may take thought of her appearance. Perhaps what he rated as boldness was only the calm of innocence; what he read as a command to admire may have been only a laudable ambition to make the best of one's gifts.
But to Forbes there was an overpowering fleshliness in the display. It reminded him of the alleged festivals of Babylon, where all the women piously offered themselves to every passer-by and rated their success with heaven by their prosperity with strangers.
It seemed to him that the women of other places than New York must have dressed as beautifully, but in an innocenter way. Here the women looked not so much feminine as female. They appeared to be thinking amorous thoughts. They deployed their bosoms with meaning; their very backs conveyed messages. Their clothes were not garments, but banners.
He had dwelt for years among half-clad barbarians, unashamed Igorrotes; but these women looked nakeder than those. The more studiously they were robed, the less they had on.
A cynicism unusual to his warm and woman-worshiping soul crept into Forbes' mind. He went along philosophizing:
"All these women are paid for by men. For everything that every one of these women wears some man has paid. Fathers, husbands, guardians, keepers, dead or alive, have earned the price of all this pomp.
"The men who pay for these things are not here: they are in their offices or shops or at their tasks somewhere, building, producing; or in their graves resting from their labors, while the spendthrift sex gads abroad squandering and flaunting what it has wheedled.
"What do the women give in return? They must pay something. What do they pay?"