I did nothing to discredit this, but, on the contrary, helped along the campaign for the preservation of the literary and journalistic fiction that the American woman is a kind of divine autocrat over mankind. If I had been so vain and so ungallant as to try to make the public see the truth I should have failed. You can discredit the truth to the foolish race of men; but you cannot discredit, nor even cast a shade of doubt upon, a generally accepted fiction of sentimentality. And of all the sentimental fictions that everyone slobbers over, but no one in his heart believes with the living and only valid faith of works, the fictions about woman are the most sacred. Further, how many men are there who believe that a man could get enough of a physically lovely woman, however trying she might be? Once in a while in a novel--not often, but once in a while--there are scenes portraying with some approach to fidelity what happens between a woman and a man who is of the sort that is attractive to women. Invariably such scenes are derided or denounced by the critics. Why? For an obvious reason. A critic is, to put it charitably, an average man. He has no insight; he must rely for his knowledge of life solely upon experience. Now what is the average man’s experience of women? He treats them in a certain dull, conventional way, and they treat him--as he invites and compels. So when he reads how women act toward a man who does not leave them cold or indifferent, who rouses in them some sensation other than wonder whether they would be able to stomach him as a husband, the critic scoffs and waxes wroth. The very idea that women might be less reserved, less queenly, less grudgingly gracious than woman has ever been to him sends shooting pains through his vanity--and toothache and sciatica are mild compared with the torturings of a pain-shotten vanity. Edna scored heavily in the newspapers. You would never have suspected it was her late husband’s money that had given her everything, that had made her throughout; for, what had she, and what was she, except a product of lavishly squandered money? Think about that carefully, gentle reader, before you damn me and commiserate her as in these pages a victim of my venomous malice.... She was the newspaper heroine of the hour. If she had been content with this-- But I shall not anticipate. My cable message from New York came at five o’clock. At half-past six, accompanied only by my valet, I was journeying toward Switzerland.