a man apart from a type, looking down upon that
type with pitying scorn. This is a mere matter of fascination, too
subtle, and composed of too many parts for man's analysis, but it is the
most telling force in the clashing of the sexes.

Trennahan was an extremely practical man. He called things by their
right names, and scorned to turn his head aside when life or himself was
to be looked squarely in the eye. It is true that he cursed himself for
a fool. He was neither in his youth nor in his dotage; he was in that
long intermediate period where a man may hope that his will and sound
common-sense are in their prime,--the interval of the minimum of
mistakes. Nevertheless, he was as madly in love with Helena Belmont as
was the first man with the first woman, as a boy with his first
mistress, an old man with his last. He admitted the fact and ordered his
brain to make the best of the situation.

He was not conscious of any change in his feelings for Magdalena except
that he no longer desired to marry her. The sense of rest, of
comradeship, the tenderness and affection, had not abated. He was just
as sure that she was the woman for him to marry as he had been two weeks
ago; and he knew that he could not make a greater mistake than to marry
Helena Belmont. He believed that it would be years before she would be
capable of loving any man for any length of time. Such women not only
develop slowly, but they have too much to give, men too little. The
clever woman is abnormal in any case, being a divergence from the
original destiny of her sex. The woman who is beautiful, fascinating,
passionate, and clever is a development with which man has not kept
pace.

He spent the greater part of the three days following the dinner, on the
cliffs beyond the Golden Gate. There was no great moral battle going on
in his mind; he intended to marry Magdalena. One of his pet theories was
that one secret of the rottenness underlying the social, and in natural
sequence, the political structure of the United States was the absence
of a convention. Men were on their knees to women so long as their
pleasure was materially abetted by the attitude; but the moment the
motive ceased to exist, any display of chivalry toward her would be as
useless and wasted as toward the ordinary run of women. It is always the
woman of the moment, never woman in general. The so-called chivalry of
American men does not exist; the misconception has arisen out of the
mult