However, it is necessary to bear this reservation (if you can call it that) in mind when reflecting on the foregoing section of this essay; otherwise the reader might be puzzled by the seemingly contradictory existence of numerous noisy ladies engaged in combating Vice. Let them go. Poor things, they are rotten with complexes! thwarted souls, chafing (even though they do not know it) over their own inability to expand, and hating the whole world for their discomfort, as a child hates the table against which he has bumped his head! An excellent subject for a novel, they must be summarily dismissed from a brief essay. _Their Fastidiousness._ If women are not inhibited by moral law from what men deem wrong-doing, they often are by their fastidiousness--namely, when wrong-doing is at the same time gross and ugly (which is not nearly always the case). They have a genuine and profound appreciation of fineness, suavity and perfection. Neither is this, as men often assume, equivalent to the mere love of luxury. An indigent girl yields to a wealthy Don Juan not because he surrounds her with the comforts of riches but because he surrounds her with smoothness. She obtains a quite different and much finer satisfaction than he from his spacious silent motor car and from the polished restaurants to which he takes her. There is something hypnotic to her in the charm of elegance. The setting means a great deal to women, far more than men recognize. For while it does not matter so very much to them what they do, it matters tremendously how they do it. In this love of perfect setting they are undoubtedly right and centuries in advance of men. An act in itself--any act--is a bare and meagre thing; done fittingly, at the proper time, in a perfectly right setting, it draws upon the richness of a thousand seemly associations. Man’s world is the barren childish world of an African savage; it is hard to understand how women, who are civilized and grown-up, can endure it. _Their Maturity._ It is banal to say that men never grow up, but one should not be afraid to make a banal remark if it also happens to be true, and this, alas, is true without qualification. Men are hopeless babies. Not only do they delight in primitive things, but their whole attitude toward life is immature and absurd. They expect a great deal from life, and are hurt when they do not get it. You see them looking out at life with wide pained eyes, in precisely the same way a child looks out of the window at the rain that is spoiling his holiday.