Josephine was typical of the women of the comfortable class. For them the fundamentally vital matters of life--the profoundly harassing questions of food, clothing, and shelter--are arranged and settled. What is there left to occupy their minds? Little but the idle emotions they manufacture and spread foglike over their true natures to hide the barrenness, the monotony. They fool with phrases about art or love or religion or charity--for none of those things can be vivid realities to those who are swathed and stupefied in a luxury they have not to take the least thought to provide for themselves. Like all those women, Josephine fancied herself complex--fancied she was a person of variety and of depth because she repeated with a slight change of wording the things she read in clever books or heard from clever men. There seemed to Norman to be small enough originality, personality, to the ordinary man of the comfortable class; but there was some, because his necessity of struggling with and against his fellow men in the several arenas of active life compelled him to be at least a little of a person. In the women there seemed nothing at all--not even in Josephine. When he listened to her, when he thought of her, now--he was calmly critical. He judged her as a human specimen--judged much as would have old Newton Hallowell to whom the whole world was mere laboratory. She bored him now--and he made no effort beyond bare politeness to conceal the fact from her. The situation was saved from becoming intolerable by that universal saver of intolerable situations, vanity. She had the ordinary human vanity. In addition, she had the peculiar vanity of woman, the creation of man's flatteries lavished upon the sex he alternately serves and spurns. In further addition, she had the vanity of her class--the comfortable class that feels superior to the mass of mankind in fortune, in intellect, in taste, in everything desirable. Heaped upon all these vanities was her vanity of high social rank--and atop the whole her vanity of great wealth. None but the sweetest and simplest of human beings can stand up and remain human under such a weight as this. If we are at all fair in our judgments of our fellow men, we marvel that the triumphant class--especially the women, whose point of view is never corrected by the experiences of practical life--are not more arrogant, more absurdly forgetful of the oneness and the feebleness of humanity.