Elfrida closed her eyes and felt a little shudder of consciousness of how real it was.

When she opened them again she was putting down her protest with a strong hand, crushing her rebellious instincts unmercifully.
She did not allow herself a moment's self-deception.

She did not insult her intelligence by the argument that it was a perfectly harmless and proper thing to offer a piece of work to an editor in person--that everybody did it--that she might thereby obtain some idea of what would suit his paper if her article did not.

She was perfectly straightforward in confronting Golightly Ticke's idea, and she even disrobed it, to her own consciousness, of any garment of custom and conventionality it might have had to his.

Another woman might have taken it up and followed it without an instant's hesitation, as a matter concerning which there could be no doubt, a matter of ordinary expediency--of course a man would be nicer to a woman than to another man; they always were; it was natural.