“You’re so strong,” Marian said, in such a matter-of-fact tone of voice that West laughed out loud, though this very tone flattered and pleased him.
“I think I must stop the car, get out and bow to the ground in gratitude,” he said. “It isn’t often a pretty woman pays a pretty compliment in such a tone that there’s no doubting its genuineness.”
“Are men any better? I should hate to pay a man false compliments, but I never expect him to do anything else. When a man thinks a woman pretty he calls her lovely, and when she’s ugly he says she’s pretty, and—we—oh, we’re just weak fools enough to love a pretty lie and to hate an ugly truth.”
“Are you?” he asked bluntly.
“Present company always excepted.”
“Do you think so? When anyone says that I at once conclude that present company was particularly meant. Yes, it’s wonderful what you can do with soft-sawder, especially in business. Only you must be careful to deal with each man as an individual: some like their compliments hot, some cold, some spoken, some implied, some like to be taken for saints and some for sinners. Here’s the whole art of big business in a nutshell—‘play high, play low,’ high stakes and a low estimate of the strength of human nature; every man has his price, though more often than not it isn’t money.”
“You’re a cynic!”
“I don’t believe in labels; I try to flatter myself that I’m a practical man of business, while all the time at the bottom of my heart, I know that I’m what every man and woman really is—just a mere emotional creature of impulse. Oh, yes, I’ve met those cold-blooded, calculating, anæmic-looking men, but they’re just as impulsive, only they hoodwink themselves by finding reasons for their impulse, and very often by the time they’ve found them it’s too late to act on their impulse. Study history; you won’t find any really big man who didn’t act on impulse at all the important moments of his life; impulse unconsciously checked and guided by the intuition which makes a man a genius.”
“How is it there are no great women, then? We’ve got impulses and intuition.”
“The average woman has more intuition than the average man, but almost all women are just average. Then you let your emotions run away with you more often than we do, and you run away so far that you generally can’t get back again.”