第3章

In her five years of social life Mildred had gone only with the various classes of fashionable people, had therefore known only the men who are full of the poison of snobbishness.She had been born and bred in an environment as impregnated with that poison as the air of a kitchen-garden with onions.She knew nothing else.The secret intention to refuse Stanley Baird, should he propose, was therefore the more astonishing--and the more significant.From time to time in any given environment you will find some isolated person, some personality, with a trait wholly foreign and out of place there.Now it is a soft voice and courteous manners in a slum; again it is a longing for a life of freedom and equality in a member of a royal family that has known nothing but sordid slavery for centuries.Or, in the petty conventionality of a prosperous middle- or upper-class community you come upon one who dreams--perhaps vaguely but still longingly--of an existence where love and ideas shall elevate and glorify life.In spite of her training, in spite of the teaching and example of all about her from the moment of her opening her eyes upon the world, Mildred Gower at twenty-three still retained something of these dream flowers sown in the soil of her naturally good mind by some book or play or perhaps by some casually read and soon forgotten article in magazine or newspaper.We have the habit of thinking only weeds produce seeds that penetrate and prosper everywhere and anywhere.The truth is that fine plants of all kinds, vegetable, fruit, and flower of rarest color and perfume, have this same hardiness and fecundity.Pull away at the weeds in your garden for a while, and see if this is not so.Though you may plant nothing, you will be amazed at the results if you but clear a little space of its weeds--which you have been planting and cultivating.

Mildred--woman fashion--regarded it as a reproach upon her that she had not yet succeeded in making the marriage everyone, including herself, predicted for her and expected of her.On the contrary, it was the most savage indictment possible of the marriageable and marrying men who had met her--of their stupidity, of their short-sighted and mean-souled calculation, of their lack of courage--the courage to take what they, as men of flesh and blood wanted, instead of what their snobbishness ordered.And if Stanley Baird, the nearest to a flesh-and-blood man of any who had known her, had not been so profoundly afraid of his fashionable mother and of his sister, the Countess of Waring-- But he was profoundly afraid of them; so, it is idle to speculate about him.

What did men see when they looked at Mildred Gower? Usually, when men look at a woman, they have a hazy, either pleasant or unpleasant, sense of something feminine.That, and nothing more.Afterward, through some whim or some thrust from chance they may see in her, or fancy they see in her, the thing feminine that their souls--it is always ``soul''--most yearns after.But just at first glance, so colorless or conventionally colored is the usual human being, the average woman--indeed every woman but she who is exceptional--creates upon man the mere impression of pleasant or unpleasant petticoats.In the exceptional woman something obtrudes.She has astonishing hair, or extraordinary eyes, or a mouth that seems to draw a man like a magnet; or it is the allure of a peculiar smile or of a figure whose sinuosities as she moves seem to cause a corresponding wave-disturbance in masculine nerves.Further, the possession of one of these signal charms usually causes all her charms to have more than ordinary potency.The sight of the man is so bewitched by the one potent charm that he sees the whole woman under a spell.

Mildred Gower, of the medium height and of a slender and well-formed figure, had a face of the kind that is called lovely; and her smile, sweet, dreamy, revealing white and even teeth, gave her loveliness delicate animation.She had an abundance of hair, neither light nor dark; she had a fine clear skin.Her eyes, gray and rather serious and well set under long straight brows, gave her a look of honesty and intelligence.

But the charm that won men, her charm of charms, was her mouth--mobile, slightly pouted, not too narrow, of a wonderful, vividly healthy and vital red.She had beauty, she had intelligence.But it was impossible for a man to think of either, once his glance had been caught by those expressive, inviting lips of hers, so young, so fresh, with their ever-changing, ever-fascinating line expressing in a thousand ways the passion and poetry of the kiss.

Of all the men who had admired her and had edged away because they feared she would bewitch them into forgetting what the world calls ``good common sense''

--of all those men only one had suspected the real reason for her physical power over men.All but Stanley Baird had thought themselves attracted because she was so pretty or so stylish or so clever and amusing to talk with.Baird had lived intelligently enough to learn that feminine charm is never general, is always specific.He knew it was Mildred Gower's lips that haunted, that frightened ambitious men away, that sent men who knew they hadn't a ghost of a chance with her discontentedly back to the second-choice women who alone were available for them.Fortunately for Mildred, Stanley Baird, too wise to flatter a woman discriminatingly, did not tell her the secret of her fascination.If he had told her, she would no doubt have tried to train and to use it--and so would inevitably have lost it.

To go on with that important conference in the sitting-room in the handsome, roomy house of the Gowers at Hanging Rock, Frank Gower eagerly seized upon his wife's subtly nasty remark.``I don't see why in thunder you haven't married, Milly,'' said he.``You've had every chance, these last four or five years.''

``And it'll be harder now,'' moaned her mother.