The Price She Paid | Page 6

profoundly afraid of them; so, it is idle to speculate about him.
What did men see when they looked at Mildred Gower? Usually, when men look at a woman, they have a hazy, either pleasant or unpleasant, sense of something feminine. That, and nothing more. Afterward, through some whim or some thrust from chance they may see in her, or fancy they see in her, the thing feminine that their souls--it is always ``soul''--most yearns after. But just at first glance, so colorless or conventionally colored is the usual human being, the average woman--indeed every woman but she who is exceptional--creates upon man the mere impression of pleasant or unpleasant petticoats. In the exceptional woman something obtrudes. She has astonishing hair, or extraordinary eyes, or a mouth that seems to draw a man like a magnet; or it is the allure of a peculiar smile or of a figure whose sinuosities as she moves seem to cause a corresponding wave-disturbance in masculine nerves. Further, the possession of one of these signal charms usually causes all her charms to have more than ordinary potency. The sight of the man is so bewitched by the one potent charm that he sees the whole woman under a spell.
Mildred Gower, of the medium height and of a slender and well-formed figure, had a face of the kind that is called lovely; and her smile, sweet, dreamy, revealing white and even teeth, gave her loveliness delicate animation. She had an abundance of hair, neither light nor dark; she had a fine clear skin. Her eyes, gray and rather serious and well set under long straight brows, gave her a look of honesty and intelligence. But the charm that won men, her charm of charms, was her mouth--mobile, slightly pouted, not too narrow, of a wonderful, vividly healthy and vital red. She had beauty, she had intelligence. But it was impossible for a man to think of either, once his glance had been caught by those expressive, inviting lips of hers, so young, so fresh, with their ever-changing, ever- fascinating line expressing in a thousand ways the passion and poetry of the kiss.
Of all the men who had admired her and had edged away because they feared she would bewitch them into forgetting what the world calls ``good common sense'' --of all those men only one had suspected the real reason for her physical power over men. All but Stanley Baird had thought themselves attracted because she was so pretty or so stylish or so clever and amusing to talk with. Baird had lived intelligently enough to learn that feminine charm is never general, is always specific. He knew it was Mildred Gower's lips that haunted, that frightened ambitious men away, that sent men who knew they hadn't a ghost of a chance with her discontentedly back to the second-choice women who alone were available for them. Fortunately for Mildred, Stanley Baird, too wise to flatter a woman discriminatingly, did not tell her the secret of her fascination. If he had told her, she would no doubt have tried to train and to use it--and so would inevitably have lost it.
To go on with that important conference in the sitting-room in the handsome, roomy house of the Gowers at Hanging Rock, Frank Gower eagerly seized upon his wife's subtly nasty remark. ``I don't see why in thunder you haven't married, Milly,'' said he. ``You've had every chance, these last four or five years.''
``And it'll be harder now,'' moaned her mother. ``For it looks as though we were going to be wretchedly poor. And poverty is so repulsive.''
``Do you think,'' said Mildred, ``that giving me the idea that I must marry right away will make it easier for me to marry? Everyone who knows us knows our circumstances.'' She looked significantly at Frank's wife, who had been wailing through Hanging Rock the woeful plight of her dead father-in-law's family. The young Mrs. Gower blushed and glanced away. ``And,'' Mildred went on, ``everyone is saying that I must marry at once--that there's nothing else for me to do.'' She smiled bitterly. ``When I go into the street again I shall see nothing but flying men. And no man would come to call unless he brought a chaperon and a witness with him.''
``How can you be so frivolous?'' reproached her mother.
Mildred was used to being misunderstood by her mother, who had long since been made hopelessly dull by the suffocating life she led and by pain from her feet, which never left her at ease for a moment except when she had them soaking in cold water. Mrs. Gower had been born with ordinary feet, neither ugly nor pretty and entirely fit for the uses for which nature intended feet. She had spoiled them by wearing shoes to make them