herself. Over a vast extent of her being she is reserved. She suppresses a vast amount of her being, holds back, denies, hides. On the other hand, there is a frankness and honesty in openly bad women arising out of the admitted fact that they are bad, that they hide no treasure from you, they have no peculiarly precious and delicious secrets to keep, and no poverty to conceal. Intellectually they seem to be more manly and vigorous because they are, as people say, unsexed. Many old women, thoroughly respectable old women, have the same quality. Because they have gone out of the personal sex business. Haven’t you found that?”
“I have never,” said the doctor, “known what you call an openly bad woman,—at least, at all intimately....”
Sir Richmond looked with quick curiosity at his companion. “You have avoided them!”
“They don’t attract me.”
“They repel you?”
“For me,” said the doctor, “for any friendliness, a woman must be modest.... My habits of thought are old-fashioned, I suppose, but the mere suggestion about a woman that there were no barriers, no reservation, that in any fashion she might more than meet me half way...”
His facial expression completed his sentence.
“Now I wonder,” whispered Sir Richmond, and hesitated for a moment before he carried the great
