ng. Then, there was some real clean-cut thinking
that expressed itself with brevity and finish; and also, the
wonder-working in his heart--the happiest thing that had ever
befallen--his conception of the genius of woman in Vina Nettleton.

Cairns' experience with women was not nearly so large as it looked. He
had known many women, but impersonally. He was late to mature, and all
his younger energies were used for what he had believed to be the
world's work, but what he now perceived were the activities of a vain,
ego-driven intellect, that delighted to attract the passing eye by the
ring of the anvil and a great show of unsleeved muscle. Much of this
early work had kept him afield, and his calls home to New York had
inflicted upon him the fatal stimulus for quantity. His still earlier
years were passed in a home where a placid mother reigned, and a large
family of sisters served. He, therefore, met the world's women without
that mighty tang of novelty which features the young manhood of the
unsistered.

He had undergone his mannish period of treason to women generally.
These were the days when he believed in using force--punishing with
words--"punch," he called it. This is a mental indelicacy which the
ordinary man seldom outgrows. His crowning fact is that dynamite will
loosen stumps and break rock. Therefore, all that is not dynamite is
not proper man-stuff. Woman, to this sort, is something between "an
angel and an idiot." She must be guarded from herself in all that has
to do with thought and performance. As panderer and caterer, she
emphatically belongs. Young men grasp this. If they reach middle age
with it, only an angel can roll the stone away.

Cairns now realized he had been near to missing one of the greatest
moments that come into the life of man. What chance has the ordinary
male--half-grown, except physically--of ever glowing with real
chivalry? To him women are easy, common, plentiful, without mystery or
lofty radiance. How can the valor of humility brighten his quest? How
can _he_ be a lover--who does not realize his poverty, his evil, the
vastness of his need? What does it mean to the mere male, this highest
of earthly gifts, the glance from a woman which ends his quest of her,
the gift of herself? To be great and a man, and a lover, he must reach
that point of declaration which holds: _Without her, I am an outcast;
with her I can alter worlds!_ A transcendent moment of conquest is the
winning of a w