de the
barrenness, the monotony. They fool with phrases about art or love or
religion or charity--for none of those things can be vivid realities to
those who are swathed and stupefied in a luxury they have not to take
the least thought to provide for themselves. Like all those women,
Josephine fancied herself complex--fancied she was a person of variety
and of depth because she repeated with a slight change of wording the
things she read in clever books or heard from clever men. There seemed
to Norman to be small enough originality, personality, to the ordinary
man of the comfortable class; but there was some, because his necessity
of struggling with and against his fellow men in the several arenas of
active life compelled him to be at least a little of a person. In the
women there seemed nothing at all--not even in Josephine. When he
listened to her, when he thought of her, now--he was calmly critical. He
judged her as a human specimen--judged much as would have old Newton
Hallowell to whom the whole world was mere laboratory.

She bored him now--and he made no effort beyond bare politeness to
conceal the fact from her. The situation was saved from becoming
intolerable by that universal saver of intolerable situations, vanity.
She had the ordinary human vanity. In addition, she had the peculiar
vanity of woman, the creation of man's flatteries lavished upon the sex
he alternately serves and spurns. In further addition, she had the
vanity of her class--the comfortable class that feels superior to the
mass of mankind in fortune, in intellect, in taste, in everything
desirable. Heaped upon all these vanities was her vanity of high social
rank--and atop the whole her vanity of great wealth. None but the
sweetest and simplest of human beings can stand up and remain human
under such a weight as this. If we are at all fair in our judgments of
our fellow men, we marvel that the triumphant class--especially the
women, whose point of view is never corrected by the experiences of
practical life--are not more arrogant, more absurdly forgetful of the
oneness and the feebleness of humanity.

Josephine was by nature one of the sweet and simple souls. And her love
for Norman, after the habit of genuine love, had destroyed all the
instinct of coquetry. The woman--or, the man--has to be indeed
interesting, indeed an individuality, to remain interesting when
sincerely in love, and so elevated above the petty but potent sex
trickeries.