--she was astonished by her delight at
seeing him, and by the kind of delight it was. For it rather
seemed a sort of relief, as from a heavy burden of anxiety.

"Why didn't you wait and come with Brent?" asked she.

"Couldn't stand it," replied he. "I've grown clear away from
New York--at least from the only New York I know. I don't
like the boys any more. They bore me. They--offend me. And
I know if I stayed on a few days they'd begin to suspect. No,
it isn't Europe. It's--you. You're responsible for the
change in me."

He was speaking entirely of the internal change, which indeed
was great. For while he was still fond of all kinds of
sporting, it was not in his former crude way; he had even
become something of a connoisseur of pictures and was
cultivating a respect for the purity of the English language
that made him wince at Susan's and Brent's slang. But when he
spoke thus frankly and feelingly of the change in him, Susan
looked at him--and, not having seen him in two weeks and three
days, she really saw him for the first time in many a month.
She could not think of the internal change he spoke of for
noting the external change. He had grown at least fifty
pounds heavier than he had been when they came abroad. In one
way this was an improvement; it gave him a dignity, an air of
consequence in place of the boyish good looks of the days
before the automobile and before the effects of high living
began to show. But it made of him a different man in Susan's
eyes--a man who now seemed almost a stranger to her.

"Yes, you _have_ changed," replied she absently. And she went
and examined herself in a mirror.

"You, too," said Freddie. "You don't look older--as I do.
But--there's a--a--I can't describe it."

Susan could not see it. "I'm just the same," she insisted.

Palmer laughed. "You can't judge about yourself. But all
this excitement--and studying--and thinking--and God knows
what---- You're not at all the woman I came abroad with."

The subject seemed to be making both uncomfortable; they
dropped it.

Women are bred to attach enormous importance to their physical
selves--so much so that many women have no other sense of
self-respect, and regard themselves as possessing the entirety
of virtue if they have chastity or can pretend to have it.
The life Susan had led upsets all this and forces a woman
either utterly to despise herself, even as she is despised of
men, or to discard the sex