Duff Lindsay, so eminently responsive and calculable, came running
with open arms; in his rejoiceful eye-beam one saw almost a midwife to
one's idea. But the comparison was subtly irritating, and after a time
she turned from it. She awoke once in the night, moreover, to declare to
the stars that she was less worried by the consideration of Arnold's sex
than she would have thought it possible to be--one hardly paused to
consider that he was a man at all; a reflection which would certainly
not have occurred to her about poor dear Duff. With regard to Stephen
Arnold, it was only, of course, another way of saying that she was less
oppressed, in his company, by the consideration of her own. Perhaps it
is already evident that this was her grievance with life, when the joy
of if left her time to think of a grievance, the attraction of her
personal curves, the reason of the hundred fetiches her body claimed of
her and found her willing to perform: the fact that it meant more to
her, for all her theories, that she should be looking her best when she
got up in the morning than was justifiable from any point of view except
the biological. She had no heroic quarrel with these conditions--her
experience had not been upon that plan--but she bemoaned them with
sincerity as too fundamental, too all-pervading; one came upon them at
every turn, grinning in their pretty chains.
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