led away.

"'And besides,' she broke in on me with a short laugh, 'thirty shillings
a week! You can't keep house on that anywhere, as far as I know.'

"This shocked me, too, until I reflected that this girl was not making
sentimental overtures, that she was simply explaining her extremely
secular reasons for rejecting a particular candidate. She was in that
mood and predicament. You can call it, with a certain amount of truth, a
girl's cross-roads. It certainly seems to me to be a more momentous
point in a woman's life than the accepted and conventional crisis which
confronts virginity. A man may successfully deceive a woman, as we
phrase it (rather ineptly), and make not the smallest impression upon
her personality or character. But the man who assumes the abandoned
function of protector, no matter what you call him, is invested with
tremendous powers. No power on earth can bring her back from the road on
which he sets her feet. She's got to take her cue from him. I suppose
she knows this, and when the time comes to mark down her victim she
brings to the business all the resources of her feminine intuition and
the remorseless judgment of a panther's spring. The ruthless reference
to poor young Siddons' six pounds a month wages--thirty shillings a
week--illustrates the mood exactly. Mind you, it is absurd to accuse a
girl of being merely callous and mercenary when she talks like that. She
is really merciful to her rejections in the long run. And she is
proceeding on the very rational argument that a man's value to a woman
may be roughly gauged by the value the world sets on him. She is not
merely a greedy little fool. Women upon whom such decisions are forced
achieve extraordinary skill in estimating the characters of men. Young
chaps like Siddons simply don't count--they are thrown to the discard at
once. Innocence and purity of soul are not negotiable assets in this
sort of thing. Even men with merely a great deal of money are not so
successful as one might imagine. They fizzle out if they lack the
character which the woman admires. I have seen them fizzle. A man who
roves as I do, reserving for himself, as I have insisted, the part of a
super in the play, naturally has many opportunities of watching the
lives of these emotional adventurers and the women who constitute the
inspiration of the adventures. The singularity of the present instance
was that, for the first time in my life, I was assisting at the
inauguratio