conferring a favour on you, Mrs. Willoughby
has gained for herself the inestimable privilege of your friendship."

"Ah!" said Judith, "a man cannot tell what it means."

Really men are not such dullard dunderheads as women are pleased
to imagine. I have the most crystalline perception of what Mrs.
Willoughby's invitation means to Judith. Women appear to find a morbid
satisfaction in the fiction that their sex is actuated by a mysterious
nexus of emotions and motives which the grosser sense of man is
powerless to appreciate. In her heart of hearts it is a prodigious
comfort to a woman to feel herself misunderstood. Even she who is most
perfectly mated, and is intellectually convinced that the difference
of sex is no barrier to his complete knowledge of her, loves to cherish
some little secret bit of her nature, to which _he_, on account of his
masculinity, will be eternally blind. Of course there are dull men who
could not understand a tabbycat or a professional cricketer, let alone
an expert autothaumaturgist--a self-mystery-maker--like a woman. But
an intelligent and painstaking man should find no difficulty in
appreciating what, after all, is merely a point of view; for what women
see from that point of view they are as indiscreet in revealing as a
two-year-old babe. I have confessed before that I do not understand
Judith--that is to say the whole welter of contradictions in which her
ego consists--but that is solely because I have not taken the trouble
to subject her to special microscopic study. Such a scientific analysis
would, I think, be an immodest discourtesy towards any lady of my
acquaintance, especially towards one for whom I bear considerable
affection. It would be as unwarrantable for a decent-minded man to
speculate upon her exact spiritual dimensions as upon those portions
of her physical frame that are hidden beneath her attire. The charm
of human intercourse rests, to a great extent, on the vague, the
deliberately unperceived, the stimulating sense that an individual
possesses more attributes than flash upon the bodily or mental eye. But
this, I say, is deliberate. One knows perfectly well that beneath her
skirts any young woman you please does not melt away into the scaly tail
of a mermaid, but has a pair of ordinary commonplace legs. One knows
that when she has passed through certain well defined experiences in
life, a certain definite range of sentiments must exist behind whatever
mask of facial e