"Lookie," I said. "Many years ago, when I was younger and foolish, I wrote a book about a few of the more conspicuous and lethal flaws in our fair nation. The book was some three hundred and seventy pages long. I devoted all but about twenty pages to the calamitous follies of males. Men, as you call them. But I did, for some twenty pages of light blast, violate the ironclad altar of femininity and point out mom's big mouth and little brain, her puffed crop and shaky pins. A few things. I hardly thought I had loaded the dice--inasmuch as half the people are female and I gave females only about a fifteenth of my slightly caustic attention. But ever since that book came out, almost every woman I've met has accused me of outrageously laying the blame for a manifestly hell-bound society on females. In the first place, this is not true. In the second place, such statements--the hundreds I've collected--tend to show that American women positively refuse to take any blame for anything whatever. They have no conscience and no sense of responsibility. They believe themselves to be as spotless as United States senators say they are, in campaign orations. They lack the capacity for admitting guilt. They are nearly all--I have thus found--psychologically far, far, far more destitute than I claimed only certain kinds of them to be." She laughed. "You're _still_ mad! Someday you'll break down and write a wonderful novel about the woman who really poisoned you against them all." "I'll break down," I agreed. "But I'll never write the novel! One reason is--there's no such novel. Women have always been good to me--with a few exceptions I can tolerate. Women have made love to me and they have been generous with me, and taught me, and they have been sensitive toward me. My daughter--who is sixteen--adores me. My first wife tried every combination she could think of to make me happy--and put up with me for ten years, when I was a drunkard. My second wife has gone even further. Past ten years--for one thing. And I quit drinking altogether, after we'd been married for a while. I--to repeat the most readily understandable expression--adore her. And I adore my daughter. I adore women, as a matter of fact. Such vexation as I have shown represented an aspect of that reverence: a good many women are fundamentally disappointing to anybody who cares much for women. And I resent the general damage such women do. A man"--I looked at her as loftily as I could--"has a curious faculty for resenting human sabotage even when he is not, himself, directly involved in the matter. A woman, as a rule, sees harm in the ruinous excursion of a nitwit only if she sees it as a real or potential menace to herself, loved ones, and assigns. It is a comfortingly personal outlook toward which I am hotly antipathetic." "You talk like your books," she said. "Why not? I wrote the damned things!" She poured her brandy into her coffee and drank a little.