Big Checks would put me on a level with a performing bear, and never know the alphabet of my language, but I could talk his pidgin while thinking about something else, so I indulged him on the subject of horses.

It was evident that he was a full bachelor. He lacked the mugginess of husbands and the air of false importance which they assume through the protection of their wives. Why women can be led astray by others’ husbands or have any traffic with them I cannot conceive.

“I heard about this girl,” I said.

“By jove, do you know her! Tell me what she is like.”

He was greedily interested for that sort of bachelor which the women don’t try to attract as compared with the sort that they do.

“I believe her book was meant as a joke, but people couldn’t see it. Her relations say that she is a silly goat and that her book is just like her.”

“I knew it. No nice girl would write a book.”

“I wish I could write one—only of course a much better one than this girl has done.”

“Oh, no, my dear, don’t be led astray by the false adulation and fuss about this minx. People come to look at her like a Punch and Judy show, but the kind of girl the world is in need of, the kind a man respects is one just like your pretty little self.”

Nevertheless he had not come to see her but the dreadful female who wrote.

“Me, pretty,” I scoffed. “My mother doesn’t say so.”

“Ah, you have a sensible mother. She wants to save you from conceit. You take it from me, and I’ve seen all the girls come out for the last twenty-five years, there’s not many could hold a candle to you if you were properly tricked out. You have a face that grows on a man—something that would make him come back and look a second time; and no paint or artificiality.”

“Think how lovely Miss Actem is,” I said to end his embarrassing exaggeration.

“Pooh! Your figure and complexion run her into the Harbor, and her eyes . . .”

“They’re glorious.”

“Go and look at your own. The way she ogles and throws hers about—I’m afraid, ’pon me word, that they’ll drop out and I’ll have to pick ’em up.”

No doubt he had been snubbed by Edmée for getting in the way of more interesting cavaliers. He babbled of how the world would be dished by female suffrage. Women were never meant to express themselves politically; they were born to sacrifice themselves—that was their glory and their crown: as soon as women began to assert themselves a nation declined.

I hung on secretly to my faith that the greatest nations would always be those where women were freest. The United States and the British Empire were the two countries where women could march about alone without being assailed by the men, and even BIG CHECKS and LOUDER CHECKS would agree that the English are the greatest race on earth, and themselves the most wonderful men.