She confessed as much, had he been guided to perceive it.

She said, "Arthur Abner's a reader of men: I can trust his word about them." Presently, it is true, she added: "No man's to be relied upon where there's a woman." She refused her implicit trust to saints--"if ever a man really was a saint before he was canonized!" Her penetrative instinct of sex kindled the scepticism.

Sex she saw at play everywhere, dogging the conduct of affairs, directing them at times; she saw it as the animation of nature, senselessly stigmatized, hypocritically concealed, active in our thoughts where not in our deeds; and the declining of the decorous to see it, or admit the sight, got them abhorred bad names from her, after a touch at the deadly poison coming of that blindness, or blindfoldedness, and a grimly melancholy shrug over the cruelties resulting--cruelties chiefly affecting women.
"You're too young to have thought upon such matters," she said, for a finish to them.
That was hardly true.
"I have thought," said Weyburn, and his head fell to reckoning of the small sum of his thoughts upon them.
He was pulled up instantly for close inspection by the judge.

"What is your age ?" "I am in my twenty-sixth year." "You have been among men: have you studied women ?" "Not largely, Lady Charlotte.

Opportunity has been wanting at French and German colleges." "It's only a large and a close and a pretty long study of them that can teach you anything; and you must get rid of the poetry about them, and be sure you haven't lost it altogether.