"HE ISN'T LIKE US"


Margaret continued to sit there, her elbows on the dressing-table,
her knuckles pressing into her cheeks, the hazel eyes gazing at
their reflection in the mirror. "What is it in me," she said to
her image, "that makes me less successful at drawing men to the
point than so many girls who are no better looking than I?" And
she made an inventory of her charms that was creditably free from
vanity. "And men certainly like to talk to me," she pursued. "The
fish bite, but the hook doesn't hold. Perhaps--probably--I'm not
sentimental enough. I don't simper and pretend innocence and talk
tommy rot--and listen to it as if I were eating honey."

This explanation was not altogether satisfactory, however. She
felt that, if she had a certain physical something, which she must
lack, nothing else would matter--nothing she said or did. It was
baffling; for, there, before her eyes were precisely the charms of
feature and figure that in other women, in far less degree, had
set men, many men, quite beside themselves. Her lip curled, and
her eyes laughed satirically as she thought of the follies of
those men--how they had let women lead them up and down in public
places, drooling and sighing and seeming to enjoy their own
pitiful plight. If that expression of satire had not disappeared
so quickly, she might have got at the secret of her "miserable
failure." For, it was her habit of facing men with only lightly
veiled amusement, or often frank ridicule, in her eyes, in the
curve of her lips, that frightened them off, that gave them the
uneasy sense that their assumptions of superiority to the female
were being judged and derided.