"I must confess that I was hypocrite enough to be shocked at this. She wasn't far wrong, though. We do sail away, most of us, whether we are gentlemen or not. I suppose we are all of us, at times, the victims of the perplexing discrepancy between romance and reality. Only I wonder why it is so many of us recover, and think of our escapades with a shamefaced grin on our damaged countenances. They say these tremendous emotional experiences tend to make us nobler. Why is it, when we come to analyze ourselves and others in middle life, we seem to find nothing save the dried-up residues of dead passions and the dregs of relinquished aspirations? Why is it the young can see through our tattered make-ups and judge us so unfalteringly and with such little mercy? No doubt we get our revenge, if we live long enough and are sufficiently rapacious to take it! "Yes, I was shocked, and she regarded me with defiant derision in her bright dark eyes. She challenged me. I needn't tell you I did not then accept. Here was a woman making the supreme appeal, locked up in a castle kept by a whole regiment of ogres, and challenging me to come to her rescue. And, as she put it, I sailed away. "'And besides,' she broke in on me with a short laugh, 'thirty shillings a week! You can't keep house on that anywhere, as far as I know.' "This shocked me, too, until I reflected that this girl was not making sentimental overtures, that she was simply explaining her extremely secular reasons for rejecting a particular candidate. She was in that mood and predicament. You can call it, with a certain amount of truth, a girl's cross-roads. It certainly seems to me to be a more momentous point in a woman's life than the accepted and conventional crisis which confronts virginity. A man may successfully deceive a woman, as we phrase it (rather ineptly), and make not the smallest impression upon her personality or character. But the man who assumes the abandoned function of protector, no matter what you call him, is invested with tremendous powers. No power on earth can bring her back from the road on which he sets her feet. She's got to take her cue from him. I suppose she knows this, and when the time comes to mark down her victim she brings to the business all the resources of her feminine intuition and the remorseless judgment of a panther's spring. The ruthless reference to poor young Siddons' six pounds a month wages--thirty shillings a week--illustrates the mood exactly. Mind you, it is absurd to accuse a girl of being merely callous and mercenary when she talks like that. She is really merciful to her rejections in the long run. And she is proceeding on the very rational argument that a man's value to a woman may be roughly gauged by the value the world sets on him. She is not merely a greedy little fool. Women upon whom such decisions are forced achieve extraordinary skill in estimating the characters of men. Young