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“Well, I don’t see that. Physically it is a little rough on you, but there are compensations.”

“I have never been able to discover them. Love itself is hard on a woman. It seems to stir a man’s faculties healthily. They seem the stronger and more fit for it. It does not seem to uproot a man’s whole being. Does it serve women in that way?”

“I bear witness that it makes some of you deucedly handsome. And I have heard that it makes some of you–good.”

“Yes, as chastisement does. No, Life seems to have adjusted matters between men and women very badly, very unjustly.”

“And yet, as this life is the only one we know we must adjust ourselves to it as we find it.”

“No, no. We had better have accepted the thing as Nature gave it to us. We came into this world like beasts–why aren’t we content to live like beasts, and make no pretenses? Women would have nothing to expect then, and there’d be no such thing as broken hearts. In spite of all the polish of civilization, man is simply bent on conquest. Woman is only one phase of the chase to him–a chase in which every active virile man is occupied from his cradle to his grave. You are the conquerors. We are simply the conquered.”

Shattuck tried to make his voice light, as he said: “Not always unhappy ones, I fancy.”

“I suppose all men flatter themselves that way, and argue that probably the Sabine women preferred their fate to no fate at all.”

“Don’t be bitter on so old and impersonal a topic, Naomi. It is the law of life that one must give, and one must take. That the emotions differ does not prove that one is better than the other.”

Shattuck took a turn up and down the long room, not quite at ease with himself.

Mrs. Shattuck seemed to be thinking. As he passed her, he stopped, picked up her cushions, and re-arranged them about her, with an idle caress by the way, a kiss gently dropped on the inside of her white wrist.

She followed his every movement with a strange speculative look in her eyes, almost as if he were some new and strange animal that she was studying for the first time.

When she spoke again, it was to go on as if she had not been interrupted, “It seems to me that man comes out of a great passion just as good as new, while a woman is shattered–in a moral sense–and never fully recovers herself.”

Shattuck’s back was toward her when he replied. “Sorry to spoil any more illusions, dear child, but how about the long list of men who are annually ruined by it? The men in the prisons, the men who kill themselves, the men who hang for it?”

“Those are crimes. I am not talking of the criminal classes, but of the world in which normal people live.”

“Our set,” he laughed, “but that is not the whole world, alas!”

“I know that men–well bred, cultivated, refined, even honorable men,–seem to be able to repeat every emotion of life. A woman scales the heights but once. Hence it must depend, in the case of women capable of deep love–on the men whether the relation into which marriage betrays them be decent or indecent. What I should like to be able to discover is–what provision does either man or civilization propose to make for the woman whom Fate, in wanton irony, reduces, even in marriage, to the self-considered level of the girl in the street?”

There was amazement–even a foreboding–on Shattuck’s face as he paused in his walk, and, for the first time speaking anxiously ejaculated, “I swear I don’t follow you!”

She went on as if she had not been interrupted, as if she had something to say which had to be said, as if she were reasoning it out for herself: “Take my case. I don’t claim that it is uncommon. I do claim that I was not the woman for the situation. I was an only child. My father’s marriage had not been happy. I was brought up by a disappointed man on philosophy and pessimism.”