bag of masculine tricks, and they may cure
themselves of their present desire for the vegetable security of
marriage, but they will never cease to be women, and so long as they are
women they will remain provocative to men. Their chief charm today
lies precisely in the fact that they are dangerous, that they threaten
masculine liberty and autonomy, that their sharp minds present a menace
vastly greater than that of acts of God and the public enemy--and they
will be dangerous for ever. Men fear them, and are fascinated by them.
They know how to show their teeth charmingly; the more enlightened of
them have perfected a superb technique of fascination. It was Nietzsche
who called them the recreation of the warrior--not of the poltroon,
remember, but of the warrior. A profound saying. They have an infinite
capacity for rewarding masculine industry and enterprise with small and
irresistible flatteries; their acute understanding combines with
their capacity for evoking ideas of beauty to make them incomparable
companions when the serious business of the day is done, and the time
has come to expand comfortably in the interstellar ether.

Every man, I daresay, has his own notion of what constitutes perfect
peace and contentment, but all of those notions, despite the fundamental
conflict of the sexes, revolve around women. As for me--and I hope I
may be pardoned, at this late stage in my inquiry, for intruding my own
personality--I reject the two commonest of them: passion, at least
in its more adventurous and melodramatic aspects, is too exciting and
alarming for so indolent a man, and I am too egoistic to have much
desire to be mothered. What, then, remains for me? Let me try to
describe it to you.

It is the close of a busy and vexatious day--say half past five or six
o'clock of a winter afternoon. I have had a cocktail or two, and am
stretched out on a divan in front of a fire, smoking. At the edge of the
divan, close enough for me to reach her with my hand, sits a woman not
too young, but still good-looking and well-dressed--above all, a woman
with a soft, low-pitched, agreeable voice. As I snooze she talks--of
anything, everything, all the things that women talk of: books, music,
the play, men, other women. No politics. No business. No religion. No
metaphysics. Nothing challenging and vexatious--but remember, she
is intelligent; what she says is clearly expressed, and often
picturesquely. I observe the fine sheen of