has," he said,
innocently enough, as he turned off the gas.

A strange sensation--something which was so different from anything she
had ever felt before that she could not give it a name--pierced her
heart like an arrow. Then it fled as suddenly as it had come, and left
her at ease with the thought: "Abby has had nothing to hurt her hands.
Why shouldn't they be pretty?" But not for Abby's hands would she have
given up a single hour when she had washed Jenny's little flannels or
dug enchanted garden beds with Harry's miniature trowel.

"She used to have a beautiful figure," she said with perfect sincerity.

"Well, she's got it still, though she's a trifle too large for my taste.
You can't help liking her--she's such jolly good company, but, somehow,
she doesn't seem womanly. She's too fond of sport and all that sort of
thing."

His ideal woman still corresponded to the type which he had chosen for
his mate; for true womanliness was inseparably associated in his mind
with those qualities which had awakened for generations the impulse of
sexual selection in the men of his race. Though he enjoyed Abby, he
refused stubbornly to admire her, since evolution, which moves rapidly
in the development of the social activities, had left his imagination
still sacredly cherishing the convention of the jungle in the matter of
sex. He saw woman as dependent upon man for the very integrity of her
being, and beyond the divine fact of this dependency, he did not see her
at all. But there was nothing sardonic in his point of view, which had
become considerably strengthened by his marriage to Virginia, who shared
it. It was one of those mental attitudes, indeed, which, in the days of
loose thinking and of hazy generalizations, might have proved its divine
descent by its universality. Oliver, his Uncle Cyrus, the rector, and
honest John Henry, however they may have differed in their views of the
universe or of each other, were one at least in accepting the historical
dogma of the supplementary being of woman.

And yet, so strange is life, so inexplicable are its contradictions,
there were times when Oliver's ideal appeared almost to betray him, and
the intellectual limitations of Virginia bored rather than delighted
him. Habit, which is a sedative to a phlegmatic nature, acts not
infrequently as a positive irritant upon the temperament of the artist;
and since he had turned from his work in a passion of disgust at the
dramatic obtusene