But between knowing and liking was a vast gulf. The army women
frightened him just a little. They were in ways quite different
from the women he liked best--the elderly women, the spinsters and
the bespectacled maidens, and the very serious women of all ages
whom he met on church and library and kindergarten committees, who
came meekly to him for contributions and advice. He ruled those
women by virtue of his superior mentality, his great wealth, and the
high place he occupied in the commercial baronage of Hawaii. And he
was not afraid of them in the least. Sex, with them, was not
obtrusive. Yes, that was it. There was in them something else, or
more, than the assertive grossness of life. He was fastidious; he
acknowledged that to himself; and these army women, with their bare
shoulders and naked arms, their straight-looking eyes, their
vitality and challenging femaleness, jarred upon his sensibilities.

Nor did he get on better with the army men, who took life lightly,
drinking and smoking and swearing their way through life and
asserting the essential grossness of flesh no less shamelessly than
their women. He was always uncomfortable in the company of the army
men. They seemed uncomfortable, too. And he felt, always, that
they were laughing at him up their sleeves, or pitying him, or
tolerating him. Then, too, they seemed, by mere contiguity, to
emphasize a lack in him, to call attention to that in them which he
did not possess and which he thanked God he did not possess. Faugh!
They were like their women!

In fact, Percival Ford was no more a woman's man than he was a man's
man. A glance at him told the reason. He had a good constitution,
never was on intimate terms with sickness, nor even mild disorders;
but he lacked vitality. His was a negative organism. No blood with