re was not compelled to stoop much when speaking to her.
He liked women and girls generally. He hardly ever saw the woman or girl
he did not like. If he knew that a woman was insincere or affected, he
would not have liked her; but then he never knew it; he never saw it; it
never occurred to him. Anybody could have seen that he was a man who had
no sisters or girl-cousins. The most innocent and natural affectations
of womanhood were too deep for him to see. There really was a great deal
of truth in what he had said to Minola about his goddess theory as
regarded women. He made no secret about his greatly admiring
her--thinking her very clever and fresh and handsome. He would without
any hesitation have told her that he liked her best of all the women he
knew, but then he had often told her that he liked other women very
much. He seemed, therefore, the man whom a pure and fearless woman, even
though living in Minola's odd condition of semi-isolation, might frankly
accept as a friend without the slightest fear for the tranquillity of
his heart or of hers. Minola, too, had always in her own breast resented
with anger and contempt the idea that a man and woman can never be
brought together and allowed to walk in the beaten way of friendship
without their forthwith wandering off into the thickets and thorny
places of love. All such ideas she looked upon as imbecility, and
scorned. "I don't like men," she used to say to herself and even to
others pretty freely. "I never saw a man fit to hold a candle to my
Alceste. I never saw the man who seemed to me worth a woman's troubling
her heart about." She began to say this of late more than ever--and to
say it to herself, especially when the day and the evening had closed
and she was alone in her own room. She said it over almost as if it were
a sort of charm.

The business of the poems now gave him many occasions to call, and one
particular afternoon Victor called when, by a rare chance, Mary Blanchet
happened to be out of doors. Minola had had it on her mind that he was
not pushing his cause very earnestly, and was glad of the opportunity of
telling him so. He listened with great good humor. It is nearly as
agreeable to be lectured as to be praised by a handsome young woman who
is unaffectedly interested in one's welfare.

"I shall lose my good opinion of you if you don't keep more steadily to
your purpose."

"But I do keep steadily to it. I am always thinking of it."

"No; you