Then, too, there was Edna’s charm. Women--I mean, our fashionable and would-be fashionable American women of all classes, from Fifth Avenue to the Bowery, from Maine to the Pacific--women are parlor-bred--are bred to make an imposing surface impression. The best of them fool the most expert man, as Edna had been fooling Armitage during those two days down in the country. A man has to live with them to find them out. And often, our men, being extremely busy and kindly disposed toward their women and unobservant of them and uncritical of them, do not find them out for many years. The house is run badly, the money is wasted, the children are not brought up right. But the man lets it pass as “part of the game.” He tells himself that not much but good looks is to be expected of a woman; he buries himself still deeper in his business. Then-- If he is a successful man, along about forty when he has got up high enough to be able to relax from the labor of his career and thinks of enjoying himself, he tries to form an alliance for pleasure with his wife. And lo and behold, he discovers that he is married to a vain, superficial fool. There could have been no more delightful experience than passing a few days in the society of Edna. She had educated herself, admirably, thoroughly, for show. She could have fooled the fashionable man his whole life through, for one cannot see beyond the range of his own vision. She might have fooled many a serious man of the narrow type; an excellent shoemaker might easily be misled by a clever showy jack of all trades into thinking him a master of all trades so long as he avoided betraying his ignorance of shoemaking. But your successful American man of the highest type, having a broad range of practical interests, becomes a shrewd judge of human values. Thus, the American woman who can pass for brilliant in fashionable society at home or abroad cannot deceive the American man--for long. Not when he lives with her. No wonder she finds him coarse; who does not wince when vanity is stepped on or ignored? No wonder she thinks him uninteresting. A child would have an equally poor opinion of any person inexpert at catcher, marbles, and mud pies.