"It ended in my sending the gown back and missing the dinner party, which made Mr. G---- furious, he blamed Roberta for my resistance, and a little later he threw her over. Like most men of that type who promise women wonderful things, he was hard, selfish and exacting--a cold-blooded sensualist. And poor Roberta, indolent and luxurious, was obliged to go back to work--up at seven and on her feet all day for twenty dollars a week. She had been spending twenty dollars a day! "What is a woman to conclude from all this?" I wrote despairingly. "I know there are decent men in the world; there are employers who would never think of becoming unduly interested in their good-looking women assistants, who would never intimate that they had any claim upon the evenings of pretty stenographers or secretaries; there are lawyers who would never force odious attentions upon an attractive woman whose divorce case they might be handling--'_Dear lady, how about a little dinner and a cabaret show tonight?_'--There are old friends of the family, serious middle-aged men who would never take advantage of a young woman's weakness or distress; but, oh dear God! there are so many others who have no decency, no heart! A woman is desperate and must confide in someone. She has lost her position and is struggling to find another. She craves innocent pleasure--music, the theatre, the dance. _She is so horribly lonely._ Help me, counsel me, she pleads to some man whom she trusts--any man, the average man. Does he help her? Yes, on one condition, that she use her power as a woman. Not otherwise. This is a great mystery to women--how men, who are naturally kind, can be so cruel, so persistent, so infernally clever in forcing women to use their power for their own undoing." * * * * * _Tuesday._ Here is an interesting thing that Kendall Brown once said on this subject--I recorded it in my diary along with other sayings of this erratic Greenwich Village poet and philosopher: "The sex power of women is the most formidable power ever loosed upon earth," he declared one evening. "Thrones totter before it. Captains of industry forget their millions in its presence. _Cherchez la femme!_ This terrible power is possessed by every dark-eyed siren in a Second Avenue boarding house, by every languishing, red-lipped blonde earning eighteen dollars a week in a department store. And she knows it! Others have vast earthly possessions, stores of science, palaces of art, knowledge without end--she has a _tresor_ that makes baubles of these--she is the custodian of life, _she has the eternal life power_." How true that is! Again I wrote: