The Price She Paid | Page 6

the most savage indictment possible of the marriageable and marrying
men who had met her--of their stupidity, of their short-sighted and
mean-souled calculation, of their lack of courage--the courage to take
what they, as men of flesh and blood wanted, instead of what their
snobbishness ordered. And if Stanley Baird, the nearest to a

flesh-and-blood man of any who had known her, had not been so
profoundly afraid of his fashionable mother and of his sister, the
Countess of Waring-- But he was 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.''