“Your views amuse me,” she said. “I am not so sure that there is not truth in what you say. Young men do not realize how much some things mean to a woman. We are very human.”
“Exactly; that is my chief point.”
“Then you believe that we need much humoring and a great measure of consideration?”
“You repeat my meaning.”
“Well?”
“A woman should find out whether a man knows how to love before she marries him.”
“How should she arrive at the conclusion?”
“If the man has any vanity, avoid him as you would avoid Satan. A man’s vices and foibles are more than half vanity. If you can tell the particular man that he is ugly or stupid, and he continues to adore you, then take him; he won’t make a bad husband.”
As may be inferred from the characters of the parties concerned and the circumstances in which they were situated, this first debate proved but the prologue to a gradual and more intimate acquaintanceship. Callydon was an amiable place, and the proclivities of its visitors were so familiar that no ill-natured criticisms were passed on ultra-Platonic friendships. Ophelia Strong was glad of the man’s countenance. When a woman’s vanity has conceived itself injured by fate, she is in a mood ripe for sympathies that can salve her smarting spirit. Nothing pleases her better than being able to hint at her woes to a friend of the opposite sex whose discretion had been matured by intimate contact with the world. It is the old fable of the child playing with fire, the inherent mischief of human nature experimenting with the morbid excitements of the more passionate affairs of the heart. However innocent be the delusion, the forbidden fruit glows amid the green leaves and the antique dragon lies grinning in the grass.
James Maltravers was a diplomat of a high psychological order. As a lover, he believed in dramaticisms of an elevated type, tragedy of a picturesque nature, moralities staged to a full orchestral accompaniment. He had studied the methods of certain up-to-date play-wrights, and had come to the conclusion that nothing impresses a woman more than the idea that a man is suffering untold ethical torments by reason of the inevitable fascination of her beauty. The picture of a moral hero struggling in the coils of love impressed him vividly with a sense of dramatic power. Such a conviction bade fair to shine with glorious persuasiveness before the fine vanity of the feminine soul. Paolo burning upon the grid of fate.