"Women are very wonderful. They are an unconscious incarnation of
knowledge. Knowledge bears the same relation to the wise that liquor
does to the man who decided the world would be better without alcohol
and started to drink it all up. Man's premier temptation is to drink up
women. Lots of men start to do it, but that's as far as they get. One
woman can absorb a dozen men; a dozen men can't absorb one woman.
Women--any one woman--is without end. Am I boring you?"

"No, sir," said Lewis. "You are giving me a perspective."

"You've struck the exact word. Since we met, I've given you several of
my seven lives, but there's one life a man can't pass on to his son--his
life with relation to women. He can only give, as you said, a
perspective."

Leighton chose a cigar carefully and lit it.

"Formerly woman had but one mission," he went on. "She arrived at it
when she arrived at womanhood. The fashionable age for marriage was
fifteen. Civilization has pushed it along to twenty-five. Those ten
cumulative years have put a terrific strain on woman. On the whole, she
has stood it remarkably well. But as modernity has reduced our
animalism, it has increased our fundamental immorality and put a
substantial blot on woman's mission as a mission. Woman has had to learn
to dissemble charmingly, but in the bottom of her heart she has never
believed that her mission is intrinsically shameful. That's why every
woman feels her special case of sinning is right--until she gets caught.
Do you follow me?"