Not being a crying woman, she suffered
quietly. She felt that Miltoun would be coming to her. She did not know
at all what she should say when he did come. He could not care for her
so much as she cared for him! He was a man; men soon forget! Ah! but he
was not like most men. One could not look at his eyes without feeling
that he could suffer terribly! In all this her own reputation concerned
her not at all. Life, and her clear way of looking at things, had rooted
in her the conviction that to a woman the preciousness of her reputation
was a fiction invented by men entirely for man's benefit; a second-hand
fetish insidiously, inevitably set-up by men for worship, in novels,
plays, and law-courts. Her instinct told her that men could not feel
secure in the possession of their women unless they could believe that
women set tremendous store by sexual reputation. What they wanted
to believe, that they did believe! But she knew otherwise. Such
great-minded women as she had met or read of had always left on her the
impression that reputation for them was a matter of the spirit, having
little to do with sex. From her own feelings she knew that reputation,
for a simple woman, meant to stand well in the eyes of him or her whom
she loved best. For worldly women--and there were so many kinds of
those, besides the merely fashionable--she had always noted that its
value was not intrinsic, but commercial; not a crown of dignity, but
just a marketable asset.
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