And what aesthetic deafness, dumbness and blindness thus open the
way for, vanity instantly reinforces. That is to say, once a normal
man has succumbed to the meretricious charms of a definite fair one
(or, more accurately, once a definite fair one has marked him out
and grabbed him by the nose), he defends his choice with all the
heat and steadfastness appertaining to the defense of a point of the
deepest honour. To tell a man flatly that his wife is not beautiful, or
even that his stenographer or manicurist is not beautiful, is so harsh
and intolerable an insult to his taste that even an enemy seldom
ventures upon it. One would offend him far less by arguing that his
wife is an idiot. One would relatively speaking, almost caress him
by spitting into his eye. The ego of the male is simply unable to
stomach such an affront. It is a weapon as discreditable as the
poison of the Borgias.


Thus, on humane grounds, a conspiracy of silence surrounds the
delusion of female beauty, and so its victim is permitted to get quite
as much delight out of it as if it were sound. The baits he swallows
most are not edible and nourishing baits, but simply bright and
gaudy ones. He succumbs to a pair of well-managed eyes, a
graceful twist of the body, a synthetic complexion or a skilful
display of ankles without giving the slightest thought to the fact that
a whole woman is there, and that within the cranial cavity of the
woman lies a brain, and that the idiosyncrasies of that brain are of
vastly more importance than all imaginable physical stigmata
combined. Those idiosyncrasies may make for amicable relations in
the complex and difficult bondage called marriage; they may, on the
contrary, make for joustings of a downright impossible character.