On the contrary, it was
the most savage indictment possible of the marriageable
and marrying men who had met her--of their
stupidity, of their short-sighted and mean-souled
calculation, of their lack of courage--the courage to
take what they, as men of flesh and blood wanted,
instead of what their snobbishness ordered. And if
Stanley Baird, the nearest to a flesh-and-blood man of
any who had known her, had not been so profoundly
afraid of his fashionable mother and of his sister, the
Countess of Waring-- But he was profoundly afraid
of them; so, it is idle to speculate about him.
What did men see when they looked at Mildred
Gower? Usually, when men look at a woman, they
have a hazy, either pleasant or unpleasant, sense of
something feminine. That, and nothing more. Afterward,
through some whim or some thrust from chance
they may see in her, or fancy they see in her, the thing
feminine that their souls--it is always ``soul''--most
yearns after. But just at first glance, so colorless or
conventionally colored is the usual human being, the
average woman--indeed every woman but she who is
exceptional--creates upon man the mere impression of
pleasant or unpleasant petticoats.
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