He was
not one of those who take it upon themselves to say that they understand
women--using the word in an offensively general sense, as if women were
situated midway between the human and the animal races. He was
old-fashioned enough to look upon women as higher and purer than men,
while equally capable of thought and self-control. He had, it must be
remembered, no great taste for fictional literature. He had not read the
voluminous lucubrations of the modern woman writer. He had not assisted
at the nauseating spectacle of a woman morally turning herself inside
out in three volumes and an interview.
No, this man respected women still; and he paid them an honor which,
thank Heaven, most of them still deserve. He treated them as men in the
sense that he considered them to be under the same code of right and
wrong, of good and evil.
He did not understand what Etta meant when she told him to be careful.
He did not know that the modern social code is like the Spanish
grammar--there are so many exceptions that the rules are hardly worth
noting. And one of our most notorious modern exceptions is the married
woman who is pleased to hold herself excused because outsiders tell her
that her husband does not understand her.
"I do not think," said Paul judicially, "that you can have cared very
much whether I loved you or not.
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