Men are much more presumptuously vain than women. They can be vain with no preparation, in their shirt sleeves, with a three days’ stubble of beard on their faces and no hair at all on their heads. Their vanity seems to be a sort of rooster-tail instinct, with which they have been endowed so that they may do the work of the world and waste no time primping. It is an illusion, of course, this physical egotism, but the queer thing is that it is an illusion of them shared by most women. So they get away with it. And few of them ever know how purposefully and sardonically they are afflicted by Nature with homeliness. On the other hand, when you get down to the psychological facts, I doubt if women are vain at all. They may be beautiful, but even at that they have so little confidence in their beauty that the last one of them must finance her assurance with all the make-believe art of loveliness. I suppose she has discovered that it is not beauty that wins the lover, but it is the deliberate proclamation she thus makes to him of her charms. And this is no illusion. For the history of that grotesque sex is that the average man will pass a naturally beautiful woman every time to pay his court to a painted, powdered and puffed woman who is not nearly so good-looking, if you washed her face and buttoned her up to the neck-line of modesty. Here was Helen, for example, seated beside this young man, all whiteness and sweetness, eyes so blue that even in this moonlit darkness they showed like sunlit skies, lips pink, parted like the petals of a rose, teeth like pearls glistening between--the very emblem of loveliness; and yet she was in an anguish of uncertainty, lest he did not and never would care for her. I don’t know--this may be one of the scurvy tricks Nature plays on women to keep them humble. If so, it is not the only one. I admire the achievements and beauties of Nature as much as any one, but I must say from first to last her methods appear to me unscrupulous. The silence had grown oppressive. Helen made some slight movement. She probably clasped her hands and squeezed her patience. It was hard to be omitted so long from his thoughts. The rustle she made, faint as it was, recalled him, as he let her know with a glance. “I was just thinking, Helen, what a sorry little runt of a town this is,” he said, lifting his chin a trifle higher over the little runt of a town. There was a slight pause. You must have a moment in which to adjust yourself to the incredible, especially when you have not been thinking about anything so far removed. “Shannon?” she asked in an exclamatory tone. “Yes; it is. You can’t imagine how it looks to me after two years away from it, how it compares with the big places I have seen--dried up, sun-baked, no atmosphere, no culture.”