"Among all the others. Maleness has just about disappeared in your
native land, sister. The boys are all brought up by women, and taught
by women in school, and then they go to work to support women by
manufacturing and distributing the things women think they want. It's
called civilization--and actually it's only the highest form barbarism
has yet reached. Trinket-and-gadget society. Domestic convenience
society. A society that holds a handkerchief to one end and sets
the other on a flush toilet--a society that aims to make the linen
germicidal and the toilet silent, colored, and perfumed."
"And men? What do they do? Use fingers and squat?"
"You're learning too fast. Live outdoors, avoid neurosis, and so escape
the common cold. I think they could stand for the flush toilet--but
they would be more concerned in getting the nitrogen back to the
topsoil than they would in the orchid rims. First things first and a
conscious sense of responsibility for the future--that's us boys."
"Phooie!"
"Who do you like--to go on from lunch? Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, George
Raft, Rudolph Valentino, Gregory Peck, or some of the new boy friends
of the bobby-soxers I'm too old to remember the names of?"
"None of them. And I never saw Valentino in a picture."
"Meaning him."
"At least--he acted as if he had manners."
"On the contrary. He did, in a mannerly way, several things banned by
the book of etiquette."
"Isn't that the same?"
"From the woman's viewpoint."
"Don't you ever get tired finding imaginary inferiorities in women?"
"Did I say it was inferior? It isn't. More realistic, in fact.
Don't you, on the other hand, prefer to be appreciated for
differences--rather than to worry over the need of proving identities?"
"_Modern Woman--the Lost Sex._ You got it out of the book."
"It's a pretty good book."
Yvonne watched the waiter exchange a filled glass for the empty one.
She seemed to want to defer talking while she caught up with something
in her mind. She sipped, and stared at the people eating dinner in
the azure haze the place calls light, and sipped again. She had a
good-sized mouth with a pretty shape: the lipstick went where the lips
were, and nowhere else.
"I wanted to talk to you. I was ready to pester you. That's why I moved
next door. I was going to let you find it out when we came back this
evening. I was going to ask you in. I'm not afraid of you."
"Smallest achievement in the history of courage."
"I want to figure out what to do about Rol. You see--I'm still crazy
about him."
"Send him to a good psychiatrist."