But observation leads me to think that it is a
business less profitable than is often imagined. Hm!"
He drummed on the table, and when he continued, he seemed talking to gain
time, considering what he wished to say.
"I grant you," he said with his cumbrous playfulness, "that the
sensibility of flesh and blood to beauty is as broad a fact as the effect
of heat or cold. It is so universally recognised that we take a pretty
girl, like original sin or the curse of labour, as a _chose jugee_.
Her sway must have begun with the glacial drifters and the kitchen
middeners and the Engis skull man, when they and the rest of the
paleoliths were battling with the dodo and the dinornis and the
didifornis, and had no time for the cult of beauty except by proxy. Did it
ever occur to you that we men drove a hard bargain with your sex when we
compelled you to beauty, made you carry the topknots and the tail-
feathers? Men propose marriage, women adorn themselves to listen. Let
women choose their mates, and they might go as plain as peahens; and men
would strut about, displaying wattles, combs and argus-eyed plumes."
"Women would be less beautiful if they proposed?"
"Some could not be, I fear.
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