"I am afraid you must have seen a very woe-begone personage."
"Yes; you seemed unhappy, I thought."
"There is something sympathetic about you, Miss Grey, for all your coldness and loneliness."
"Surely," said Miss Grey, "a woman without some feeling of sympathy would be hardly fit to live."
"You think so?" he asked quite earnestly and gravely. "So do I—so do I indeed. Men have little time to sympathize with men—they are all too busy with their own affairs. What should we do but for the sympathy of women? Now tell me, why do you smile at that? I saw that you were trying not to laugh."
"I could not help smiling a little, it was so thoroughly masculine a sentiment."
"Was it? How is that now?" His direct way of propounding his questions rather amused and did not displease her. It was like the way of a rational man talking with another rational being—a style of conversation which has much attraction for some women.
"Well, because it looked upon women so honestly as creatures only formed to make men comfortable, by coming up and sympathizing with them when they are in a humor for sympathy, and then retiring out of the way into their corner again."
"I can assure you, Miss Grey, that never has been my idea—nothing of the kind, indeed. To tell the truth, I have not known much about the sympathy of women and all that. I have lived awfully out of the world, and I never had any sisters, and I hardly remember my mother. I know women chiefly in poems and romances, and I believe I generally adopt the goddess theory. In honest truth, most women do seem to me a sort of goddesses."
"You will not be long in England without unlearning that theory," Miss Grey said. "Our writers seem to have hardly any subject now but the faults and follies of women. One might sometimes think that woman was a newly-discovered creature that the world could never be done wondering at."