resistible.
A trained nurse tells me that even when undergoing the extreme
discomforts of parturition the great majority of women continue to
modify their complexions with pulverized talcs, and to give thought to
the arrangement of their hair. Such transparent devices, to be sure,
reduce the psychologist to a sour sort of mirth, and yet it must be
plain that they suffice to entrap and make fools of men, even the most
discreet. I know of no man, indeed, who is wholly resistant to female
beauty, and I know of no man, even among those engaged professionally by
aesthetic problems, who habitually and automatically distinguishes the
genuine, from the imitation. He may doit now and then; he may even preen
himself upon is on unusual discrimination; but given the right woman and
the right stage setting, and he will be deceived almost as readily as a
yokel fresh from the cabbage-field.

10. The Process of Delusion

Such poor fools, rolling their eyes in appraisement of such meagre
female beauty as is on display in Christendom, bring to their judgments
a capacity but slightly greater than that a cow would bring to the
estimation of epistemologies. They are so unfitted for the business
that they are even unable to agree upon its elements. Let one such
man succumb to the plaster charms of some prancing miss, and all his
friends will wonder what is the matter with him. No two are in accord as
to which is the most beautiful woman in their own town or street. Turn
six of them loose in millinery shop or the parlour of a bordello, and
there will be no dispute whatsoever; each will offer the crown of love
and beauty to a different girl.

And what aesthetic deafness, dumbness and blindness thus open the way
for, vanity instantly reinforces. That is to say, once a normal man has
succumbed to the meretricious charms of a definite fair one (or, more
accurately, once a definite fair one has marked him out and grabbed him
by the nose), he defends his choice with all the heat and steadfastness
appertaining to the defense of a point of the deepest honour. To tell a
man flatly that his wife is not beautiful, or even that his stenographer
or manicurist is not beautiful, is so harsh and intolerable an insult to
his taste that even an enemy seldom ventures upon it. One would offend
him far less by arguing that his wife is an idiot. One would relatively
speaking, almost caress him by spitting into his eye. The ego of the
male is simply un