Gordon cried, with scorn.

"Maybe my grief is a little strained--but really, Frank, I hate
women, not because I don't feel the need of their love--"

He drew the muscles of his big mouth together and looked thoughtfully
out of the window with his single piercing eye.

"No; for the first time on that point I'll make an honest, clean
confession to you. I hate women because I'm afraid of them. I
have a face that can stop an eight-day clock if I look at it hard
enough; and yet beneath this hideous mask there's a poor coward's
soul that worships beauty and hungers for love! I don't allow women
in this house because I can't stand the rustle of their drapery.
I don't want one of them to get her claws into me. They can see
through me in a minute. Women have an X-ray in their eyes. They
can look through a brick wall, without going to see what's on
the other side. A man learns a thing is true by a painful process
of reasoning. A woman knows a thing is so--because! She knows it
thoroughly, too, from top to bottom. Whenever a woman looks at me I
can feel her taking an X-ray photograph of the marrow of my bones."

He wheeled suddenly and fixed his eye on Gordon.

"I'll bet you had another quarrel with your wife last night?"

"How do you know?"

"Tell by your hangdog look. You look like an old Shanghai rooster
that a little game-cock has knocked down and trampled on for half