something for her besides merely marrying and breeding--just as
much for her as for a man. But what? If she should marry a man
who would let her rule him, she would despise him. If she should
marry a man she could respect--a man who was of the master class
like her father--how she would hate him for ignoring her and
putting her in her ordained inferior feminine place. She glanced
down at her skirts with an angry sense of enforced masquerade.
And then she laughed --for she had a keen sense of humor that
always came to her rescue when she was in danger of taking
herself too seriously.

Through the foliage between her and the last of the stretches of
highroad winding up from Remsen City she spied a man climbing in
her direction--a long, slim figure in cap, Norfolk jacket and
knickerbockers. Instantly--and long before he saw her--there was
a grotesque whisking out of sight of the serious personality upon
which we have been intruding. In its stead there stood ready to
receive the young man a woman of the type that possesses physical
charm and knows how to use it--and does not scruple to use it.
For a woman to conquer man by physical charm is far and away the
easiest, the most fleeting and the emptiest of victories. But
for woman thus to conquer without herself yielding anything
whatsoever, even so little as an alluring glance of the eye--that
is quite another matter. It was this sort of conquest that Jane
Hastings delighted in--and sought to gain with any man who came
within range. If the men had known what she was about, they
would have denounced her conduct as contemptible and herself as
immoral, even brazen. But in their innocence they accused only
their sophisticated and superbly masculine selves and regarded
her as the soul of innocence. This was the more absurd in them