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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
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