stinctly aloof. Had he offended her in some way?

He continued soberly. "I'm not paying insincere compliments. It isn't
your sketch which interests me so much as your method of sketching. The
directness of it. The way you get to the heart of the subject without
worrying over detail. The incisiveness. I'm mentally applying your
method to the problems of my own work.... To stand here and watch you
sketching is pure selfishness on my part."

"Like other men, you imagine that women can't get beyond detail." A
flush had come into her voice. "All through the ages men have been
learning from women and refusing to acknowledge it."

"In which sphere?"

"In every sphere."

"Particularize."

"Take novel-writing. Men sneer at the woman-novelist--say that she
cannot draw a man to the life."

"It's largely true."

"What's the reason? Because one can't draw to any satisfaction without
models to base on. Because a man never lets a woman into his innermost
thoughts."

"That argument ought to cut both ways."

"It doesn't. Women give up their innermost secrets to men
because----Well, because woman is the sex that gives and man the sex
that takes. It's been bred in and in through the whole history of
civilization."

"Woman the sex that gives? That reverses the usual idea."

"You're thinking of the things that don't matter--money, jewels, dress,
mansions, servants. Those are the cheap things that man gives in return
for the gifts that are priceless."

Riviere shook his head. "You argue only from a limited knowledge of the
world. There are plenty of women who take everything--_everything_--and
give nothing in return. Perhaps you don't know such women. I do."

"You mean women of the underworld? They are as men make them."

"No, I'm thinking of _femmes du monde_. There are plenty of virtuous
married women who are as grasping as the most soulless underworlder.
Probably you don't see them. You look at the world in a magic crystal
that mirrors back your own thoughts and your own personality in
different guises. You see a thousand YOU's, dressed up as other people."

Elaine had become very thoughtful. "My magic crystal--yes." she mused.
"But surely everyone has his or her crystal to look into."

"Some can keep crystal-vision and reality apart. That's 'balance' ...
And there lies the failure of the feminists--in 'balance.' They make up
a bundle of all the iniquities of human nature, and try to dump it on
man's side of the fenc