and, so he saw in each impulse to enter Eden boldly a temptation to him to trespass, a temptation to her to mask her real feelings and suffer it.  The mystery in which respectable womanhood is kept veiled from the male, has bred in him an awe of the female that she does not fully realize or altogether approve—­though she is not slow to advantage herself of it.  In the smaller cities and towns of the West, this awe of respectable womanhood exists in a degree difficult for the sophisticated to believe possible, unless they have had experience of it.  Dory had never had that familiarity with women which breeds knowledge of their absolute and unmysterious humanness.  Thus, not only did he not have the key which enables its possessor to unlock them; he did not even know how to use it when Del offered it to him, all but thrust it into his hand.  Poor Dory, indeed—­but let only those who have not loved too well to love wisely strut at his expense by pitying him; for, in matters of the heart, sophisticated and unsophisticated act much alike.  “Men would dare much more, if they knew what women think,” says George Sand.  It is also true that the men who dare most, who win most, are those who do not stop to bother about what the women think.  Thought does not yet govern the world, but appetite and action—­bold appetite and the courage of it.

CHAPTER XIX

MADELENE

To give himself, journeyman cooper, the feeling of ease and equality, Arthur dressed, with long-discontinued attention to detail, from his extensive wardrobe which the eighteen months since its last accessions had not impaired or antiquated.  And, in the twilight of an early September evening, he went forth to settle the matter that had become the most momentous.

There is in dress a something independent of material and cut and even of the individuality of the wearer; there is a spirit of caste.  If the lady dons her maid’s dress, some subtle essence of the menial permeates her, even to her blood, her mind, and heart.  The maid, in madame’s dress, putting on “airs,” is merely giving an outlet to that which has entered into her from her clothes.  Thus, Arthur assumed again with his “grande toilette” the feeling of the caste from which he had been ejected.  Madelene, come herself to open the door for him, was in a summer dress of no pretentions to style other than that which her figure, with its large, free, splendid lines, gave whatever she happened to wear.  His nerves, his blood, responded to her beauty, as always; her hair, her features, the grace of the movements of that strong, slender, supple form, gave him the sense of her kinship with freedom and force and fire and all things keen and bright.  But stealthily and subtly it came to him, in this mood superinduced by his raiment, that in marrying her he was, after all, making sacrifices—­she was ascending socially, he descending, condescending.  The feeling was far too vague to be at all conscious; it is, however, just those hazy, stealthy feelings that exert the most potent influence upon us.  When the strong are conquered is it not always by feeble forces from the dark and from behind?